PLEASE READ!!! I DON'T POST STUFF LIKE THIS AND THIS IS SERIOUS TO ME! ELON MUSK IS TRYING TO DUMP THOUSANDS

special defense

does this count as anything ???is this art

"You think you're informed just because you read a bunch of grainy PDFs?"

Yeah man. Reading scholarly works on a topic informs you on that topic. That's how this works.

~ day 2 of 30 of my TAZ Music Challenge ~ i rolled a 6 which was Carey and Killian on my list! while i was writing, it was important that they are wholesome AND want to get into a fight >:) art credits to rebecca chan!! https://linktr.ee/rebchan/

Autumn in Northern Mongolia

Autumn arrived in a blaze of color in north-central Mongolia. The montane forests surrounding Lake Hövsgöl, the country’s largest lake by volume, took on golden hues in late September 2024, while high mountain ridges nearby sported a layer of bright white snow.

At an elevation of 1,645 meters (5,397 feet), Lake Hövsgöl (also known as Khuvsgul and Khövsgöl) sits at the foot of the eastern Sayan Mountains, near the border with Russia. Along with shrubs and grasslands, forests consisting primarily of Siberian larch (Larix sibirica) blanket the hills around the lake. Larches are deciduous conifer trees, meaning that they have cones and needles like conifers, but they change color and drop their needles in the fall like deciduous trees.

The result of this seasonal transformation was captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on September 26 (above, right). For comparison, an image acquired about one month earlier by the OLI-2 on Landsat 9 (left) shows much greener vegetation.

Lake Hövsgöl, which has existed for over 2 million years, is one of the world’s ancient lakes. It measures approximately 137 kilometers (85 miles) from north to south and is an important water resource for Central Asia, holding about three-quarters of Mongolia’s freshwater. Researchers have described the lake as “near-pristine,” with minimal development in its watershed. Its waters are oligotrophic, or low in nutrients, and very clear. The only outlet from Lake Hövsgöl ultimately feeds into the much older and larger Lake Baikal, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) to the east.

Fall is a relatively short season in this part of northern Mongolia. Ice can start to form on Lake Hövsgöl as early as November and persist into June. Reaching thicknesses up to 1.5 meters (5 feet), the ice once supported truck routes across the lake. Driving on the ice has been prohibited for decades due to environmental concerns, and efforts are underway to retrieve vehicles that sank while attempting the crossing.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

i goofed around in ableton and blender and now there's a thing!! ✨️

rodentia vol. 1 is a small selection of tracks i've accumulated while worldbuilding for a larger narrative project about rodents. it is cozy and wistful and the beginning of more to come. enjoy if you like rats and all of their important cousins.

~ keith

Why do men have nipples?

it's not just human men, it's all placental mammals!

pour one out for all of the "I found this weird lump on my male cat's chest, what is it" posts on r/cats

the short answer is: because it's easier.

so, natural selection is lazy. it tends to take the quickest and easiest path to any given solution and can only work with what it already has, so it's really reluctant to drop traits that aren't actually hurting anything by being around! like male nipples.

and since male and female mammals in general start as the same weird little flesh tadpole thing and only start to diverge a couple months into development, it's waaaay easier to just leave male mammals with mostly non-functional nipples than it is to patch them out and maybe bork up something with the female nipples by mistake.

tldr: it's because evolution is naturally lazy.

i love prairie dog. he is like a brother to me. i hope they get well soon

hi! love what you do! can we hear more about the massive black tailed prairie dog colony?

Sure!

So, for a bit of context, black-tailed prairie dogs organize themselves first into coteries, or small family groups usually consisting of one adult male, three to four adult females, and pups. Up to a dozen of these coteries make up a 'ward' centered around a natural landmark like a hill; these wards are like neighborhoods, in which coteries are aware of each other but don't interact much. Sometimes a colony consists of a single ward, but more often there will be multiple wards that make up a colony (also called a town). Towns can house miles of interconnected burrows and tunnels which its inhabitants use to move underground.

The largest of these colonies was first described by naturalist Vernon Bailey in the early 1900s. At the time, the colony extended from the city of San Angelo to Clarendon-- a distance of about 430 km (250 mi). Bailey described the inhabitants of the town as "...comparatively tame, standing at the entrance to their hole, flipping their tails, and steadily barking." He also noted that, "When properly prepared and cooked, they are a delicacy."

Unfortunately, disease and extermination regimes have decimated black-tailed prairie dog populations, and it's now estimated that less than 10 million live in the state of Texas.

Shout out to the little girl at my store today who had a shirt that said "skeleton mouse" and she was carrying around a plushie of a rat, had hair clips in her hair that had rats on them, and a necklace with a rodent skull on it.

As I was checking her mother out at the register she pulled out a handful of rubber rats from her pocket and put them on my counter, to which her mother sighed and said "no sweetie, he doesn't need rats" to which I just looked at her like this

where's that "was anyone gonna tell me" meme when you need it because holy shit did the bird app just slap me in the face with this

(and yes, it's real and terrifying tbh)