"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🧪

New research reports that cats meow more frequently when greeting male owners. It’s hypothesized that men “require more explicit vocalizations to notice and respond to the needs of their cats.” In other words, the researchers are suggesting that many cats have concluded that men don’t always listen

Nature always finds a way. Camouflage in a caterpillar lets it hide in plane sight. Photographer unknown.

A funny

"Our job is not to solve every problem in the world, but to do our part with grace, integrity and courage." Cornel West

In emails Democrats released, Epstein wrote that “Trump had spent hours at my house” with one of the victims and that he believed Trump knew more than he had acknowledged, and called Trump “evil beyond belief.” You know you’re in trouble when someone evil beyond belief calls you evil beyond belief.

Pigeons (Columba livia) seem to be able to sense magnetic fields by detecting tiny electrical currents in their inner ears. This is probably the clearest demonstration of the neural pathways responsible for magnetic processing in any animal. 🧪

“We’ve observed a galaxy from less than 600 million years after the Big Bang, and not only is it hosting a supermassive black hole, but the black hole is growing rapidly. This challenges our understanding of black hole and galaxy formation in the early Universe.” 🧪

National Geographic Pictures of the Year 2025 showcases "the images that most inspired and defined the past year through the eyes of its photographers and editors," the storied yellow-bordered mag says.

The invading ant integrates herself into the nest by pretending to be a member of the colony, then sprays the host queen with fluid that causes her daughters to turn against her. The parasitic queen then usurps the throne, having the workers serve her instead as the new queen regent.

For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico.

Swept Away - a detailed account of the Camp Mystic Flash Flood

In a new study, researchers found that people who speak only one language are twice as likely to experience accelerated aging compared to multilingual individuals. 🧪

Flip the cards of 50 species to see how scientists used them to help us

A new gene-editing drug could effectively cure high cholesterol in certain patients via a one-time shot, according to results from a small clinical trial revealed Saturday. The treatment lowered “bad” cholesterol and triglycerides by about half with no apparent side effects after two months.

"Being talented isn't enough. If you look at the best players, it's always the hardest working ones. " - Earvin "Magic" Johnson

Astrophysicists present evidence the universe's expansion is decelerating, challenging Nobel Prize-winning theory of universe expansion at ever-increasing rate. 🧪

This photo by Richard Lasher shows the moment Mount St Helens erupted on May 18, 1980.

Finally

Looking East, the mountain ranges of Nevada rose one after the other, receding like waves. The gold of the leaves, and the sleeping houses of this Saturday morning were beautiful on their own, and the hot air balloon sat up above, like a cherry on top! #nevada #travelnevada #Nevadaday #sonyalpha

Are We Losing Our Democracy? …the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.

An antivenom that uses antibodies from a llama and an alpaca can neutralize venom from some of the world’s most venomous snakes, including cobras & mambas. In mice, the treatment conferred protection against toxins from 17 of the snake species and reduced skin damage caused by venoms. 🧪

New observations of colliding black holes suggest black holes formed in dense regions where they repeatedly merge 🧪

The nature of gravity — and whether it can be reconciled with quantum mechanics — is one of the biggest mysteries in physics 🧪

"In America, people think social democracy is some kind of communism. They think capitalism is freedom. It's not. It's only freedom to exploit people" - actor Stellan Skarsgard

Two fatty acids often used in dairy products might help to give civet coffee its distinctive flavour. The unusual brew, otherwise known as Kopi Luwak, is made by roasting coffee beans that have been eaten and excreted by Asian palm civets (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). 🧪

Not that easy.

Physicians discover link between COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and survival of patients with late-stage lung cancer and melanoma, suggesting mRNA vaccines train the immune system to kill tumors. 🧪

Does anyone think that it’s morally right that one man, Elon Musk, has more wealth than the bottom 52% of the population? Or that 60% of the population is living paycheck-to-paycheck?

And there’s a creepy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feel to the press corps at the White House now, as the perches of legacy media get filled with MAGA ringers — like the two White House “reporters” from Mike “MyPillow” Lindell’s “news” network.

Sir David Attenborough, the British documentarian and naturalist, became the oldest person to win a Daytime Emmy on Friday at age 99. He beat the record set last year by Dick Van Dyke.