pawprintsonpavements

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Archive.org deliver a windfall of lost music.

If you’re looking for a good way to spend the rest of your week, Archive.org have unearthed a gigantic collection of cassettes from the mid-eighties into the mid-nineties. According to their notes, the collection was saved from the archives of noise-arch.net and donated by former CKLN-FM radio host Myke Dyer in August of 2009. Due to the size and obscurity, the collection hasn’t been properly notated but is said to include cassettes ranging from “tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indie, rock, DIY, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials”. Head to Archive now to download the free collection.

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Unknown Photographer. A lamplighter lighting a gas lamp in a street in Glasgow, Scotland, 1955.

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"aw i love your earrings, they're so cute!" i say, making the barista's day. i sit down with my coffee and send a respected mutual an anon ask reading "you look like you've got that homestuck kinnie pussy." thus i have maintained the balance of suffering in the world for another day. as i wander down the beach of life, my footsteps do not even disturb its grains

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really wish gender was more of a hobby and less of a societal contract and mandate

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you’ve never met someone like me. you will never meet someone like me again

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Reading queer theory is crazy it's like. Here's a bunch of stuff you've been vaguely annoyed by but unable to put into words & why people act like that. And you're like wow that was really insightful & then you go back to watching the way people behave & your vague annoyance has been replaced with crystal clear well-articulated annoyance. I'm gonna start throwing books at people

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Another year, another group of my delightful ninth graders trying to spell the word "tragedy" for their Romeo and Juliet assignment.

Last year's collection

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I think that when we tell teenagers that their lives will be over if they don't have the most perfect possible trajectory through the education system, that this is, perhaps, if I may be bold, not good for them,

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Source: Sayaki Kiramoto on Twitter

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Fun Fact Friday: There are Species of Lesbian Lizards!

This is a New Mexico Whiptail Lizard (Aspidoscelis neomexicanus), and I am 100% sure that this lizard is a female! How can I know? 

Well, because every New Mexico Whiptail Lizard is a female!

There are about 45 species of whiptail lizards (which used to be one genus but then were sorted mostly into the genera Aspidoscelis and Cnemidophorus), at least 15 of which are “unisexual” species, i.e. all-female species. 

(some species are fun colours!)

These lizards reproduce exclusively via parthenogenesis, which basically means they clone themselves every time they reproduce, laying eggs that contain genetically-identical offspring. Now, normally I would call such a species asexual lizards, to get some of that good ace rep, but here’s the thing:

These all-female lizards still mate with each other.

(gal pals! 😉)

Every breeding season, these lizards go through same-sex mating behaviours, including lengthy courtship rituals, which culminates in one female lizard mounting the other. 

This process can last more than 10 minutes.

(I love this paper)

Without same-sex mating, a female might lay one or two eggs in a breeding season. Maybe. With same-sex mating, a female can lay up to 9 eggs in a season! That’s 2-3 clutches with 2-3 eggs in each, and a HUGE increase in reproductive success!

A BBC clip about these lizards from 2010 claims that the “male-like” behaviour of the females is caused by an increase of “the male hormone testosterone”, but that’s actually not true. At all. 

The BBC lied to me about Lesbian Lizards!!!

In reality, testosterone levels stay uniformly low throughout the breeding season, while the cycling of estrogen and progesterone are what triggers the different mating behaviours. Neither of these hormones are generally referred to as “male” hormones. 

(git gud, BBC. Honestly, this 2 minute clip has a bunch of mistakes, mostly to increase the Drama, but whatever, I guess). 

(one of my favourite graphs in anything, tbh)

Before the ovulation, the lizard’s levels of estrogen increases, leading to “female-like” mating behaviour. After mating, but before the eggs are laid, estrogen drops off a clip while progesterone peaks, and the female goes off to mate with other females, this time in the “male-like” role.

(This one is A. exsanguis, which is fun because it’s name means “lacking blood” although I am 99.999999% sure that they do have blood)

Once the eggs are laid, the female has a period of inactivity, probably because laying eggs is a lot of work and she doesn’t have the TIME or ENERGY to deal with the ups and downs of courtship. 

(Seriously, though, it probably is a way to recover after the metabolically-taxing work of reproduction. Let the new mom REST).

This has been Fun Fact Friday, telling you the story of the Lesbian Lizards because I love lesbian lizards so much you guys you don’t even know.

Also, my city celebrates Pride in August, so Happy Pride to All! (But especially to Lesbian Lizards, my beloved)

Oh, look. More Sources:

Keep reading

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Fun Fact: Most moths remember being caterpillars!

About a month ago, I was talking to a kid and their parent about butterflies, because I will talk to anyone and everyone about bugs if given the opportunity. As a throw away comment, I told the child that they should always be kind to caterpillars, because they will remember it as butterflies!

The main reason I said this was to remind the child to be respectful to living things in general, but the parent expressed shock at this tidbit and asked me how on earth scientists could possibly have figured that out. So I told her, and now I’m going to tell all of you!

The short answer is that, basically, we gave a bunch of caterpillars an education, and then, after they transformed into moths, we tested their memory!

(The caterpillar and moth pictures used in this post are not the same species as was used in the study, which were Manduca sexta, and in fact these pictures are of two different species, but shhhh. Edit: apparently the “caterpillar” might just be a sawfly larva, which isn’t even in the same ORDER as moths, so… whoops?)

Of course, caterpillar school isn’t the same as human school. Instead, the caterpillars were taught to associate a little shock (similar to a static shock from a doorknob) with a very specific scent. 

After a few repetitions, the caterpillars were individually given the choice to travel down one of two paths: one with the scary scent and one with “clean air”. 

Before metamorphosis, 80% of the caterpillars chose the “clean air” path. 

After the caterpillars metamorphosised into moths, they were tested again, and it was found that 77% of moths went down the path with “clean air”. 

This means that approximately 54% of the moths remembered their training as a caterpillar!

But wait, didn’t 77% of the moths choose “correctly”? Shouldn’t that mean that 77% of the moths remember being a caterpillar? 

Nope! Why not? Well, mostly due to math (my frenemy).

See, when the scientists tested untrained moths (and also ones who were only exposed to the shock, or only exposed to the scent as a caterpillar) they found that they went down the clean air path about 50% of the time, which is about what we would expect if the moths were choosing randomly. 

This means that, among the moths who completely forgot their training, we would expect approximately 50% of them to select the “clean air” path”. In other words, about half of the forgetful moths in this test were “correct” by accident, sort of like guessing the answer for a True or False question.

54% may or may not be better than the percent of humans who remember literally anything they learned while in school (see: me googling how to do basic algebra to figure out that 54% number). I don’t know what percent of my schooling I remember, but it definitely isn’t 100%

Still, considering how much of the caterpillar becomes mush during metamorphosises, even 54% of the moths remembering is really, really impressive!

Now, these numbers are inexact, simply because we’re working with probability and also because we have to make a few assumptions. 

For example, we are assuming that EVERY moth that remembered their training would have avoided the scary scent and taken the “clean air” path. However, this is not actually guaranteed! Maybe some moths remembered the scary scent and still decided to take the scary air path.

Why would they do this? Well, we can’t be sure, but I’m going to imagine it’s because of something like this:

So there you have it! This is how we know that most moths (and presumably butterflies) remember being caterpillars! 

This has been Fun Fact Friday, warning you to treat caterpillars kindly, just in case one decides to come after you for VENGENCE as a butterfly.

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OKAY THIS ARTICLE IS SO COOL

I'm going to try to explain this in a comprehensible way, because honestly it's wild to wrap your head around even for me, who has a degree in chemistry. But bear with me.

Okay, so. Solids, right? They are rigid enough to hold their shape, but aside from that they are quite variable. Some solids are hard, others are soft, some are brittle or rubbery or malleable. So what determines these qualities? And what creates the rigid structure that makes a solid a solid? Most people would tell you that it depends on the atoms that make up the solid, and the bonds between those atoms. Rubber is flexible because of the polymers it's made of, steel is strong because of the metallic bonds between its atoms. And this applies to all solids. Or so everybody thought.

A paper published in the journal Nature has discovered that biological materials such as wood, fungi, cotton, hair, and anything else that can respond to the humidity in the environment may be composed of a new class of matter dubbed "hydration solids". That's because the rigidity and solidness of the materials doesn't actually come from the atoms and bonds, but from the water molecules hanging out in between.

So basically, try to imagine a hydration solid as a bunch of balloons taped together to form a giant cube, with the actual balloon part representing the atoms and bonds of the material, and the air filling the balloons as the water in the pores of the solid. What makes this "solid" cube shaped? It's not because of the rubber at all, but the air inside. If you took out all the air from inside the balloons, the structure wouldn't be able to hold its shape.

Ozger Sahin, one of the paper's authors, said

"When we take a walk in the woods, we think of the trees and plants around us as typical solids. This research shows that we should really think of those trees and plants as towers of water holding sugars and proteins in place. It's really water's world."

And the great thing about this discovery (and one of the reasons to support its validity) is that thinking about hydration solids this way makes the math so so so much easier. Before this, if you wanted to calculate how water interacts with organic matter, you would need advanced computer simulations. Now, there are simple equations that you can do in your head. Being able to calculate a material's properties using basic physics principles is a really big deal, because so far we have only been able to do that with gasses (PV=nRT anyone?). Expanding that to a group that encompasses 50-90% of the biological world around us is huge.

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as someone who rarely listens to music, i am unceasingly in wonderment at the emotional connection many humans have to music as a medium. genres & styles & artists and all that jazz --you guys care a lot about this stuff. i sit marveling at the sheer commonplaceness of people feeling an intimate connection to individual songs & albums & musicians. to the point musical preferences are often considered a meaningful part of one's identity as an individual....thats crazy. so much passion...so much fierceness of feeling ...people say "you have to listen to this song" and i listen for 30 seconds and say "neat!" bc it is, it's neat! the chorus is catchy! i might tuck it away to hum to myself later. but for now im putting my earplugs back in returning to the glorious silence that my essence depends on the same way my lungs depend on an oxygen-rich atmosphere. u beset me with fascination

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You have been sentenced to death in a magical court. The court allows all prisoners to pick how they die and they will carry it out immediately. You have it all figured out until the prisoner before you picks old age and is instantly transformed into a dying old man. Your turn approaches.

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Works by octonimoes