Mice That Eat Yogurt Have Larger Testicles
Eli Dolgin:
First, the scientists noticed that the yogurt-eating mice were incredibly shiny. Using both traditional histology techniques and cosmetic rating scales, the researchers showed that these animals had 10 times the active follicle density of other mice, resulting in luxuriantly silky fur.
Then the researchers spotted something particular about the males: they projected their testes outward, which endowed them with a certain “mouse swagger,” Erdman says. On measuring the males, they found that the testicles of the yogurt consumers were about 5 percent heavier than those of mice fed typical diets alone and around 15 percent heavier than those of junk-eating males.
More important, that masculinity pays off. In mating experiments, yogurt-eating males inseminated their partners faster and produced more offspring than control mice. Conversely, females that ate the yogurt diets gave birth to larger litters and weaned those pups with greater success. Reflecting on their unpublished results, Erdman and Alm think that the probiotic microbes in the yogurt help to make the animals leaner and healthier, which indirectly improves sexual machismo.
[Kottke]
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Cycloalexy
Cortland State University
Cycloalexy is a form of gregarism, and involves group reactions. The name is derived from the Greek “kuklos” = circle and “alexo” = I defend, I protect. It is the attitude adopted at rest by some insect larvae, both diurnal and nocturnal, in a tight circle when either the heads or ends of the abdomen are juxtaposed at the periphery, with the remaining larvae at the center of the circle. It can also be named the ring defense behavior. Coordinated movements such as the adoption of threatening attitudes, regurgitation, reflex bleeding and biting are used to repel predators or parasitoids. If for any reason, the circle is broken, ants or pentatomids can easily catch some larvae.
See also: Sheltron formation.
p0gmoth0in:
What ‘you’ (we) are is not limited to what is contained within the arbitrary limits of the human body. Every time you take in a breath of air, the air becomes a part of your body. Every time you breathe out, part of your body is lost. Are you your body? No, there is only awareness of your body. What is it that is aware of your body? Look deeply within your own experience and try to find that source of awareness.
I can tell you that you won’t be able to find that source - awareness is just arising because the conditions are in place for awareness to arise. But me telling you this is not enough - you have to search and search to try and find that entity which is aware before you will actually see directly that ‘you’ as a separate self do not exist. There is no ‘silent witness’ back there watching all this happen.
When you see a bird in a tree, who or what is it that is seeing the bird? Look back at your ‘self’ and try to find that division between seeing and the seer. Is it possible that there is nothing back there ‘seeing’ the bird? that there is only the phenomenon of sight arising, not something back there experiencing sight? There is the mind which likes to judge and label things, but the mind consists of thoughts, and you are not your thoughts either - thoughts are just arising within awareness.
Every experience we have is like this. Sight, sound, smell, taste, tactile senses, and even thoughts are all just arising and passing - none are permanent. Yet the mind that organizes these sensations and perceptions has tricked itself into believing that it is the self which all of these things happen to, that the mind is permanent because it feels like it is. But then you take a look at this sense of self. When is it apparent? When does this sense of self exist? If you pay attention, the sense of self only arises when thoughts concerning the self arise. Our mind thinks in language. Every sentence (and consequently every thought) needs a subject and a verb. It’s handy to be able to use “I” as a subject to point toward ‘this’ frame of reference or ‘this’ mind, but in the end it’s just a concept.
The concept of “Billy” is just an idea, a character that the mind has decided to identify as. Yet Billy has spent his entire life convinced that he is that character. That he is a separate entity from the world around him. So he spends his whole life trying to make the character of Billy (who he is convinced is him) complete. His whole life is spent chasing that idea that if Billy is happy, he will be happy. But the truth is that all he ever was, all he ever is, and all he ever will be is the present moment. And the present moment is missing nothing - there is nothing to attain, no external condition that will make the present moment more perfect than it already is. And it’s this idea that happiness comes from the ‘completion’ or ‘advancement’ of that self concept which causes the vast majority of strife and suffering in our lives.
If you want to be free of this illusion, all you have to do is see it directly for yourself, and then stop believing it (easier said than done - the mind has been building up this illusion all your life). But once you see this directly for yourself, the jig is up, and ‘you’ are no longer held hostage by the mind - by this idea that there is something to lose if you ‘mess up’. You can’t win the game of life, but you can quit and laugh at how pointless it was to even try. If you want to be happy, be happy now - don’t try to hold on to happiness though - it will come and go just like everything else, and in the end happiness is just another emotion, arising and passing like everything else.
I’m rambling but I hope this brings you some clarity.
[Reddit]
It’s interesting that James Cameron is funding this, considering the plot of Avatar.
Bacterial colony the size of Uruguay
The megabacteria were discovered in the cold Chilean waters in the 1960s, but, Gallardo said, few scientists could believe at the time that a bacterium could measure two to seven centimetres - big enough to see with the naked eye.
and
These bacteria have a very old lineage, stretching back as much as 2.5 billion years to a time when the oceans contained no oxygen. At that time megabacterial mats may have blanketed the entire ocean, Gallardo said.
