Bird brains — Dhanish
We default to thinking intelligence scales with brain size, that it's a mammal thing, that it correlates with being "higher" on some imaginary evolutionary ladder. Turns out it's about neuron density and architecture, not mass. A 10 gram raven brain running 1.2 billion neurons is doing more per gram than almost anything else in nature.
The Comedy of Errors That Was the First-Ever Space Walk
On this day, 61 years ago, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first human being to step outside a spacecraft with nothing between his fragile body and the punishing abyss of space except for a few layers of material. Tethered to the Voskhod ship with an umbilical cord of sorts, Leonov floated freely for around 10 minutes before being called back. That’s when things started to go wrong.
Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly (Idle Words)
On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board. The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.
Katherine Rundell · Consider the Greenland Shark
Shakespeare wrote one of his very few references to the plague, catching at our precarity: ‘The dead man’s knell/Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives/Expire before the flowers in their caps/Dying or ere they sicken.’ As he wrote, a Greenland shark who is still alive today swam untroubled through the waters of the northern seas. Its parents would have been old enough to have lived alongside Dante; its great-great-grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above them the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.
Neanderthals survived on a knife’s edge for 350,000 years | Science | AAAS
Between 400,000 and 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals had most of Eurasia to themselves, hunting large game, harvesting plants, expertly knapping stone tools, and fashioning clothing from animal skins. But their existence was precarious. Two new studies show many Neanderthals lived in small, far-flung groups; likely experienced significant inbreeding; and survived a close brush with extinction about 75,000 years ago.
The Weather Channel – RetroCast Now
And now, your RetroCast. Brought to you by The Weather Channel
ARMANDO IANNUCCI – Season 21 Interview | Taskmaster
Het kan niet rap genoeg komen. Armando Ianucci is fantastisch.
Stripper Index: Why Exotic Dancers Think A Large Military Deployment Is Coming | HuffPost Life
Sex workers have long been bellwethers for major shifts in the economy — and they’re also more in touch with military action than your average civilian. Even if you’ve managed to avoid the news and aren’t aware of the Trump administration’s war with Iran and the skyrocketing gas prices accompanying it, erotic dancers and sex workers are paying attention and noticing a shift.
JuliusBrussee/caveman: 🪨 why use many token when few token do trick — Claude Code skill that cuts 75% of tokens by talking like caveman
A Claude Code skill that makes Claude talk like a caveman — cutting ~75% of tokens while keeping full technical accuracy. Based on the viral observation that caveman-speak dramatically reduces LLM token usage without losing technical substance. So we made it a one-line install.
