What so many people in the world don’t understand is that artists aren’t simply “chasing dreams.” More — so much more — than that, they are being themselves, investing, discovering, learning, creating, changing, growing, breaking, reinventing, building, sharing, teaching, and inspiring.

Never disparage artists. Without them, troubled hearts, anxious souls, and knotted minds would know little refuge, and nominal growth.
#ArtsAppreciation #RespectArtists #FineArts #PerformingArts #arts #artists

Hossam Shabat’s team: “An Imminent Humanitarian Catastrophe Threatens the Lives of Hundreds of Patients and Wounded in Gaza

The lives of hundreds of Palestinian patients and wounded individuals at Nasser Medical Complex are facing an imminent threat due to the complete depletion of diesel fuel required to operate the electric generators, which the hospital relies on entirely amid the ongoing power outage. Israel occupation siege is killing thousands of patients.

In this context, Dr. Mohammad Saqr, Director of Nursing at the complex, stated: “The generators will cease functioning within the next 24 hours,”
warning that this would effectively constitute “a death sentence for dozens of premature infants, wounded individuals in intensive care units, and patients who rely on oxygen to stay alive.””

#Gaza

Today I learned about 'rabbit starvation' and how Neanderthals avoided it.

When you're a hunter-gatherer and it's winter, you may try to survive by eating only meat - like rabbits, but also deer and other game. But this gives you too much protein and not enough carbohydrates and fat: most of this meat is very lean. If you eat enough lean meat to get all the calories you need, you can die from an overdose of protein! It's called 'protein toxicity'.

Hunter-gatherers in this situation sometimes throw away the 'steaks' and 'roasts' - the thighs and shoulders of the animals they kill - or feed them to their dogs. They need FAT to survive! So they focus on eating the fatty parts, including bone marrow.

So, in some cultures, while the men are out hunting, the women spend time making bone grease. This takes a lot of work. They take bones and break them into small pieces with a stone hammer. They boil them for several hours. The fat floats to the top. Then they let the water cool and skim off the fat.

There's been evidence for people doing this as far back as 28,000 BC. But now some scientists have found a Neanderthal 'bone grease factory' that's 125,000 years old!

This was during the last interglacial, in Germany. In a site near a lake, called Neumark-Nord, Neanderthals killed a lot of bison, horses and deer and crushed their bones, leaving behind tens of thousands of small bone fragments.

• Lutz Kindler et al, Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257

Thanks to @sarahtaber for spotting this!

Fediverse is still the most lively social network I have ever used, since MySpace in 2003. It is better than Twitter or any commercial social media platform ever was. Absolutely love being here.

The most profound thing about it is the international coverage. After the first wave of enshittification in 2010, algorithms took over, and suddenly as a polyglot I was labeled as Finnish. No more visible international posts, people only saw the Finnish ones.

I've noticed the same effect in commercial AI. It ignores the fact that I use English online 99% of the time and still replies to me in Finnish despite all instructions. Algorithms and AI label you. They assign you a language, a status, a certain type of person. There's no changing that.

The Fediverse and Mastodon are delightfully mine, yours, and truly open source - respecting privacy. Nobody's machine can tell you, "You are this, and this is why we do that."

Fuck labelers and the fog machines. Let me be me. Here, on my own server, I can embrace my weirdness and post however I want, how often I want, whenever I want, in whatever language I choose - without constantly worrying about how my identity will be perceived by a machine.

#SocialMedia #Mastodon #Fediverse

How a bubbly barrier could be life-saving for plunging boobies https://phys.org/news/2025-07-barrier-life-plunging-boobies.html

"#boobies (#birds of the genus Sula) may be able to reduce the potentially lethal impact of their high-speed vertical dives by creating a cushion of #supercavitation bubbles upon impact with the water... Without this cushioning, hitting the water at 100 km/h would cause a massive impact—likely strong enough to break bones or even be fatal"

Boosting is really important on the Fediverse because it makes whatever you boost federate to the entire servers of all your followers. A boosted public post appears on your followers' timelines, but also becomes searchable to everyone on the servers of your followers.

Instead of an algorithm, the Fediverse relies on human beings sharing stuff they find interesting. This process creates a wonderful chain of discovery.

To boost something here, click the 🔁 or 🚀 button below the post.

#FediTips