“Dark oxygen” source discovered on ocean floor. “The metal nodules are able to make oxygen precisely because they act like batteries”, splitting seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
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I read Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s newsletter about “a more lateral approach to Mother’s Day” back when it came out in May, and while I’m not the target audience, I keep thinking about this bit on friendship:
After my mother died in 2021, my family returned home from the memori...
An explainer and organizational toolkit from Red Wine & Blue about Project 2025. “It is frighteningly anti-democratic and goes against what the vast majority of Americans want for our country.”
Kamala Harris and her views on the climate crisis. “Harris has made clear throughout her career that she views climate change as a significant threat.”
News Happening Faster Than Man Can Generate Uninformed Opinions. “It’s getting harder and harder to come up with enough incoherent perspectives to meet the moment.”
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55 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 16th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a smal...
If elected, will Trump end democracy? He Will Try. “How high do his odds of success have to be before you treat this as a genuine emergency? Is a 20 percent chance of losing our democracy too low? Is 30?”
The FCC has voted to more closely regulate prison telecom services, a move that will significantly cut the exorbitant fees that families pay to communicate with incarcerated people.
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Cat Graffam combined their love of art and old technology to create a mashup of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World and the Windows XP wallpaper, using MS Paint and a mouse. You can watch how they did it in this video:
Prints of the finished product are available. (via waxy)
Tags: Andrew Wyeth · art · Cat Graffam · remix · video · Windows
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No one knows exactly when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon — and we’ll likely never know for sure. “It wasn’t like an Olympic swim race where touching the wall stops the timer.”
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Here are a couple from this past Eastertime. (Previously.)
Tags: diary comics
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The editors of The Lancet Microbe on the origins of Covid-19. “SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus that found its way into humans through mundane contact with infected wildlife that went on to cause the most consequential pandemic for over a century.”
In 1934, Dorothy Thompson became the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany for writing critically & unfavorably about the regime and its leader, Adolf Hitler:
He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose fram...
The action in Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower begins on July 20, 2024 — that’s tomorrow. “Beginning in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed…”
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Deadpan comic icon Bob Newhart has died at age 94. I was a weekly viewer of Newhart in the 80s and, I’m just now realizing, followed in the footsteps of the titular character in being an NYC writer who moves to VT. 🫠
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The Peregrine Falcon is the world’s fastest animal;1 it can reach speeds of more than 240 mph during dives. It uses that speed to kill other birds in mid-air. Here’s a video of a Peregrine diving and killing a duck, shot with a camera mounted on the falcon’s back.
It’s co...
Keanu Reeves & China Miéville have written a novel called The Book of Elsewhere, centered on an 80,000-year-old warrior who cannot die.
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California has strengthened its electrical grid significantly in recent years: no rolling blackouts or grid emergencies during heatwaves because of solar energy and battery storage (“now equivalent to 5 very large nuclear power plants”).
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Interactive map from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science: What will my city’s climate feel like in 60 years? “Many cities could experience a future climate unlike anything present on Earth today.”
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In a well-researched piece for the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer writes about the “network of well-funded far-right activists” who are making plans for Trump’s second term. It’s more than just Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation — and as his first term showed, it’s not n...
The reintroduction of beavers in southwest England has resulted in a marked increase in resilience against flooding and droughts and the formation of habitats for endangered wildlife.
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Maripedia is an online database of hundreds of print patterns that Marimekko has used in their products since the 1940s. You can browse by decade, designer, or style…or you can search by image. That’s right, just upload an image of the pattern on your pillowcase or dress and it’ll tell you who designed it and when.
Also, just take a look at these patterns:
Endless design and color palette inspiration. (via @presentcorrect.bsky.social)
Tags: color · design · Marimekko
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A Guide to Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys: warawara, susuwatari (soot sprites), kodama, Ponyo’s sisters. “Their designs are quite simple, but their meaning frequently is not.”
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A useful tool for students & researchers (“educational purposes only”): Bypass Paywalls Clean extension for Chrome.
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Lessons from the recent French elections. “You have to vote! You have to. You can’t do anything without voting. The freaking French, who’ll protest for anything, are showing up to vote.”
I’ve been waiting, sitting at my desk with hands tented, for historian Heather Cox Richardson to write about Project 2025 and just now I found out that she did so back in March, because of course.
In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for or...
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