Reminds me of the Talking Heads song Once In A Lifetime: “And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?" Yes, how did our country get here?? To this MAGA madness?

Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased

The Rise of Eyes Began With Just One Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the evolution of the vertebrate eye. New research suggests that it traces back to a cyclopean invertebrate with a single eye atop the head.

Enhanced rock weathering: crush silicate rocks, add to crop soil, and let the rock dust naturally react with CO2. The reactions bind carbon into stable mineral forms that can persist for millennia, while also enriching the soil with nutrients, boosting crop yields and increasing farmer profits 🧪

Repeated exercise strengthens the wiring in a mouse’s brain, making certain neurons quicker to activate. “Exercise is not just about muscles breaking down and building up,” says neuroscientist and study co-author Nicholas Betley. “It’s changing your whole brain.”🧪

It’s part of the scenario in “The Day After Tomorrow,” but scientists differ over whether or how fast it may occur. A team studying the current toils to bring clarity.

DNA damage from ionizing radiation (IR) erupting from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 is showing up in the children of those originally exposed, researchers have found – the first time such a transgenerational link has been clearly established. 🧪

This is an important point

In a moment of intimacy, the parent of this one week-old sarus crane chick makes beak-to-beak contact. Photo taken in a rice paddy in Huai Chorakhe Mak Non-Hunting Area in Buri Ram, Thailand. Credit: Ponlawat Thaipinnarong

Trump’s Obama Derangement Syndrome by Maureen Dowd Yes, I second this opinion

Trump’s Stifling of Dissent Reaches a New Level

Renee Good’s Brothers Testify After Fatal Minneapolis Shooting

“In Carlsbad cavern, in the seemingly pitch dark, microbes were able to harness light for energy – the same kind of light given off by red dwarf stars, the most common kind of star in our galaxy. This means we can search for extraterrestrial life in more places than prevously thought.”

Snow Drought in the West Reaches Record Levels Yes, there’s no snow in sight here in Lake Tahoe

It turns out that exposure to diverse microbes and proteins early in life creates broad immune memory and a specific antibody that helps block allergic reactions later in life. Rather than overreacting to harmless allergens an experienced immune system responds in a balanced way.

New research shows that early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there. The evidence: a 500,000-year-old mammoth-bone hammer, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. The National Institutes of Health failed to protect brain scans that an international group of fringe researchers used to argue for the intellectual superiority of white people.

The game rock-paper-scissors is so common that it exists beyond our own species. Over millions of years, animals have evolved their own version of it. For them, winning the game means passing down their genes to future generations. 🧪

A large scale study has found that mammals that undergo castration or sterilization enjoy significantly longer lifespans. "The energetic costs of reproduction have measurable and sometimes considerable consequences for survival, "said researcher Fernando Colchero.

British researchers have confirmed uttering expletives can help people "push harder"when tackling physical challenges. "Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident, and less distracted, "said study author Richard Stephens.

What I saw, as federal agents stormed the city and residents banded together to protect themselves, was a dark, dystopian future becoming reality.

The New A.I. Boom has produced a crop of new billionaires — at least on paper — from smaller start-ups. These individuals may become future Silicon Valley power brokers like the wealthy executives created by past tech booms, including the late-1990s dot-com frenzy

A 130-million-year-old fossil site on the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia has reshaped global understanding of dinosaur diversity during the Early Cretaceous.🧪

After 4 months at nursery, babies share 15-20% of the microbial species in their guts with their fellow infants — higher than the proportion they had acquired from family up to that point. And parents are affected, too: moms also acquired bacteria from other families through their kids. 🧪

How Much Can One Man Make From Being President? This article has great visual graphics that makes it worth a look.

Trump Said He’d Unleash the Economy in Year 1. Here’s How He Did.

Rewriting What’s Possible in the Mountains Kilian Jornet wanted to summit 72 of the tallest peaks in the contiguous United States. He gave himself a month to do it.

Hidden growth rings reveal Tyrannosaurus rexes reached full size of roughly 8 tons at about 40 years; past studies estimated growth stopped around 25 years 🧪

I usually agree with the opinions of Ms Goldberg. She gets to the point By Killing Renee Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All

According to this study, sleep's indispensable function emerged early in animal evolution and is so crucial that it outweighed its inherent dangers.

"The most common way people lose their power is thinking they don't have any." = Alice Walker

I read that The Big Bang Theory's Kunal Nayyar said he likes to go on GoFundMe at night and just pay random families' medical bills.

Billionaires control the cable channels, social media companies, newspapers, movie studios & essentially everything we consume. The sheer scale of this wealth is unfathomable. Why can't they see how bad they are coming off? For the first time, a majority of us think they are a threat to democracy.

Explore the ways animals and plants protect human health and what’s at stake when species are endangered.

Trump’s First Year Back, in 10 Charts

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James Carville: “No one cares about Trump. They’re not scared of him anymore. His presidency other than the legal power he has is over. No one gives a fuck about him. No one is scared of him.”

Alan Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard Law School for the love of god!!

A photographer seeking shots of bearded vultures and deer in the Italian Alps discovered a cache of dinosaur footprints that scientists are calling “remarkable.” The finding in Stelvio National Park, near the Swiss border consists of 1,000s of fossilized footprints more than 200 million years old

“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.” ― David Bowie

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters." - Antonio Gramsci

"Happy endings are just about a question of the place where you choose to stop the story." - Helen Fielding in The Paris Review

A stunning shot of the Trifid Nebula (top right) and the Lagoon Nebula combines hundreds of images taken by the 3,200-megapixel digital camera — the world’s largest — at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile that came online in 2025. Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

A pair of courting crab spiders, taken by Sandip Guha in Siliguri, India, highlights the difference in size between the male and his mate — in some species, the female is more than 60 times larger. The picture was a winner at this year’s London Camera Exchange Photographer of the Year competition.

This pushes back the evidence of fire making to -350,000 years. It is thought by scientists that the fire was made by Neanderthals

Satellite images showing the activity of Ethiopia’s dormant Hayli Gubbi volcano, which marked its first eruption in 12,000 yrs on November 23. The Hayli Gubbi volcano in northern Ethiopia erupted in dramatic fashion releasing a cloud of gas and ash that traveled across continents.

Studies suggest that the pigment used in tattoos accumulates in the lymph nodes & might affect immune responses. Researchers found that ink remained in the lymph nodes for months & had varying effects: it weakened the animals’ response to a COVID vaccine but increased the reaction to a flu vaccine.

These twisting threads wrapped in thinner, looping strands are the silk of an Australian net-casting spider (Asianopis subrufa), a consummate ambush predator. Instead of building a web and waiting for prey to fall into it, this spider holds its net in its front four legs and throws it over an insect

Research has shown that learning a 2nd or 3rd language will help keep you young. Data analyzed from 86,000 persons from 27 European countries concluded this. Those who only spoke 1 language were more than twice as likely to have a biological age older than their real age. [source: The Times (U.K.)]

In people with allergies, immune cells pump out an antibody called immunoglobulin E (IgE) as a reaction to harmless proteins. IgE tells the body to release histamine, an immune-signalling molecule that triggers symptoms.The vaccine triggers the release of another antibody that neutralizes IgE🧪