thinker4.bsky.social

Social media loves talking about how everything is getting worse. But what’s something that you’ve seen get _better_ in your lifetime?

🚨 BREAKTHROUGH: 18-year-old Arya Satheesh from Ireland has developed a plant-based plastic that can biodegrade and release an enzyme that helps break down other plastic waste. A plastic that could actually help clean up plastic waste.

Physics teacher demonstrates how to inflate a bag with a single breath using Bernoulli’s principle. [📹 Wolf_science] Original post

Can circular wings work on an airplane? #engineering

we lost an actual saint

A fluffy bear floating through the water in search of fish. Bears can float due to their thick layers of fat, which is less dense than water. Brown bears accumulate extra body fat during fall, allowing them to float while "snorkeling" for salmon. Original post

open.substack.com/pub/cmarmita...

This High Schooler Invented a Plant-Based Plastic That Removes Microplastics From the Environment as It Biodegrades

Japanese scientists created a plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours—no microplastics left behind. Made from plant-based CMC with salt-sensitive bonds, it breaks into harmless nutrients. [📹 RIKEN CEMS / Univ. of Tokyo] Original post

"Do the thing you can do instead of beating yourself up over not doing the thing you're not doing" is honestly life-changing, even life-saving, advice.

A lot of people don’t realize the dust bowl wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It happened when agrobusiness interests dramatically transformed the plains without regard for drought, and created vicious dust storms that choked whole families to death. That’s what I think of when I read about data centers.

👇👇

#Poetry #Painting #Morality The good and the evil are happening concurrently. The choice to focus on the good is itself a way to defy the evil. -Jared K Anderson 🎨 Claude Monet

It's almost impossible to convey how out of scale Trump administration corruption is with the rest of American history. It sounds insane but it's true: the second Trump administration is more corrupt than every other administration in US history *combined* and it's not close.

While chatting with some friends, it occurred to me that other people could benefit from a summary understanding of what's going on in the oil and gas markets. Here are some little pictures to give you the big picture. 🧵

This is so unsettling and moving, from @keguro.blacksky.app. (I had the exact same Bible Story series—which we got in Ethiopia, right next to Kenya—and can still remember the vivid illustrations of the soft piles of manna, the trumpeting armies outside Jericho, Lot’s wife turning into salt…)

*mutter* That annoying discovery that one of your own character would be tapping his foot and looking down his mask at you.

I completely agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene is a sentence I never thought I would ever write.

Social movement scholar here to comment on No King again. a 🧵: These protests are important b/c: 1.) as sustained image events, protests offer evidence of continued disapproval of the direction the country is going and disavowal of the country's leadership.

The hacks working furiously to rationalize Trump’s desire to end birthright citizenship serve very much the same function in law that the Discovery Institute does in biology: To create the illusion of a scholarly debate that in fact does not exist.

Killing people and destroying things “just for fun” is psychopathic behavior and even saying it is something only a psychopath would do and every U.S. news organization should be shouting that from the rooftops. Editors: Rise to the challenge of truth-telling or make room for someone who will.

(1/24) 🧵 Many people asked me for more information after my thread yesterday on the Tijuana River Valley health crisis. So here goes — what our @airborne.ucsd.edu team has found, and why no one should be forced to breathe this toxic air for another day.

Let’s talk about Graham Platner’s Big Lie, finally. In 2009, at the height of the Gulf War, the Marines barred him from active duty. Platner claims it was his forearm tattoos. But his one forbidden tattoo was the Nazi symbol on his chest. He knew - and he left the Marines rather than give it up. 1/

In a world thick with shadow, conflict, division, polarization, and cold uncertainty, joy becomes our remedy. It heals fractures, soothes wounds, and refuses to surrender to darkness. Greet each sunrise as an invitation.

People of the internet, a question: What, in your mind, is the difference between kindness and niceness? Tagging several writers who are very important to me to jump start the conversation. @theferocity.bsky.social @courtneymilan.com @scalzi.com @pronounced-ing.bsky.social

Joy is different from fun or entertainment. It's not a celebration of suffering. It's like finding fresh air when sadness surrounds us from all sides. Joy is balm, mental medicine. It offers company in loneliness, nourishment for a weary mind. It provides solace when vulnerability overwhelms us.

Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding: Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

with alt text, because everyone needs to be able to read this 😭

Okay folks. I have an ask. We need your support here at World Bee Sanctuary to keep going. To keep doing what we do for #bees #nature #people and the #planet. Please take the time to read this thread. We need you to. Thanks. gofund.me/e65ad9615 1/10

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.” 1/

#theBeeAt3 Basic bee facts every day at 3pm. # 247 This is a video of a #bumblebee. You can see that it’s a bumblebee. You see it. You know it’s a bumblebee. It’s a bumblebee. Now… If you were unlucky enough to live in a country where your president is a fucking rapist and… 1/n #bees #fascists

This is an excellent explainer. 👀 quote: “In rough terms, the workforce of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents commit crimes at an equal or even greater rate PER CAPITA than the population of undocumented immigrants do in the United States.”

We have an entire class of Democratic "leadership" that has been told that it's dangerous and extreme to say this, and that does not understand that what Democrats want is for their leaders to articulate what they believe and why they believe it. That should not be as big an ask as it apparently is.

Pew Research Institute (2023): • Red State Texas has about 2.1 million undocumented immigrants • Red State Florida has 1.6 M undocumented immigrants • Blue State Minnesota has 130,000. And yet only Minnesota is being occupied by masked thugs over "immigration." It's *not* about immigration.

Democrats could act like a real opposition party, refusing to validate Trump malfeasance with votes, and setting up a shadow cabinet that regularly communicates how Democrats would be different. But nah. It’s not only a majority of Democratic voters that hate this approach. US allies see it too.

Thread. We could choose to have nice things.

For @msnownews.bsky.social, I wrote an article about how ICE Watch is grounded in sociological theories of violence prevention. The reality is that most men will only commit public violence in extremely specific scenarios and ICE Watch disrupts the conditions necessary for escalation.

I get it. That’s how they want you to feel. But they wouldn’t be trying to break everything now if they thought they could just rig the midterms. There’s a reason they crammed the entire agenda into the first 2 years.

Here’s a comment for the people who are upset that MN hasn’t charged Jonathan Ross already: If you just Leeeroy Jenkins this shit you will lose and you will empower fascism and murder. It is indescribably hard to prosecute cops for murder. It is even hard when the murder is ON VIDEO. /1

Yes, this is exactly the time to demand Democrats "do something." They can denounce Trump's actions as unconstitutional. They can state that he must be impeached and removed. They can make clear that all involved will be held accountable. These are the core duties of a role they all signed up for.

Members of Congress: stop posting online and APPEAR, PHYSICALLY on the steps of the Capitol to decry this unconstitutional violation of domestic & international law. SHOW THE PEOPLE the level of danger we are facing as a country. @housedemocrats.bsky.social @senatedemocrats.bsky.social

Most people think Trump is unraveling because of indictments and enemies. They’re wrong. He’s collapsing because he violated the oldest rules of power ever discovered...the same rules mob bosses had to master to survive.👇 www.jackhopkinsnow.com

“Who’s going to pay for all those social services? You????” Yes. I want my tax dollars to go towards making life better for everyone. I want them to fund housing, education and healthcare instead of war, ICE and enriching the billionaire class.

‪Harry Tuttle‬: an organism that perpetually grows is called cancer. every other species self regulates it's population, for example when there's too many coyotes they start having smaller litters. Why wouldn't the human species be doing the same thing? 10 billion of us is plenty.