Fidèle (May 2003–January 2016), a Belgian yellow Labrador Retriever, made famous due to his habit of sleeping on a windowsill facing the Groenerei canal in in Bruges, Belgium.
Along the southern Virginia riverbank, piles of discarded contents from bullets, chemical makings from bombs, and raw explosives — all used or left over from the manufacture and testing of weapons ingredients at Radford — are doused with fuel and lit on fire, igniting infernos that can be seen more than a half a mile away. The burning waste is rich in lead, mercury, chromium and compounds like nitroglycerin and perchlorate, all known health hazards. The residue from the burning piles rises in a spindle of hazardous smoke, twists into the wind and, depending on the weather, sweeps toward the tens of thousands of residents in the surrounding towns.
Nearby, Belview Elementary School has been ranked by researchers as facing some of the most dangerous air-quality hazards in the country. The rate of thyroid diseases in three of the surrounding counties is among the highest in the state, provoking town residents to worry that emissions from the Radford plant could be to blame. Government authorities have never studied whether Radford’s air pollution could be making people sick, but some of their hypothetical models estimate that the local population faces health risks exponentially greater than people in the rest of the region.
More than three decades ago, Congress banned American industries and localities from disposing of hazardous waste in these sorts of “open burns,” concluding that such uncontrolled processes created potentially unacceptable health and environmental hazards. Companies that had openly burned waste for generations were required to install incinerators with smokestacks and filters and to adhere to strict limits on what was released into the air. Lawmakers granted the Pentagon and its contractors a temporary reprieve from those rules to give engineers time to address the unique aspects of destroying explosive military waste.
I’d been kicking this idea around for a while and trying to think about how to articulate it. Pretty happy with how it eventually turned out!
Sometimes I think about my reasons for getting tattoos (just for myself, not because they need justification). Adding onto this painting metaphore, I think getting ink is a way for me to put down portable roots. I move a lot and will be doing it again soon, and until I can actually settle down and paint some walls I’ll take visual control of something more accessible, namely myself.
Don’t be sad, friend! They know exactly what they’re doing. ^v^
Pigeons have the same cognitive capacity as five year old humans, and have been documented taking advantage of our transportation systems to commute back and forth from foraging grounds farther than they could have easily flown, at a much lower energy cost.
They know the times, which trains go where, where all the best food stops are, and which stop is theirs.
And they tend to be model passengers, taking their seats under the big human seats, and politely filing out at their work and home stops. ^v^
pigeon has responsibilities I’m so proud of them
NYC pigeons intentionally use the subway system all the time. Particularly in the above ground lines in the Bronx and near Coney Island. My favorite is when they’re traveling in pairs and wait near the doors, just going a stop or two. Super cute, and clever!
I’m just going to say that there’s clearly room for other social species in our society. It doesn’t just to be us versus all the other animals.
Just when we thought octopuses couldn’t be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.
In a surprising twist, scientists have discovered that octopuses,
along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA
(ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.
This is weird because that’s really not how adaptations usually
happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some
fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation – a change
to the DNA.
Really interesting short read for those interested in evolution.
stupid non-cephalopodes: evolve through a relatively stable updating of genetic matrices
grand cephalopod savants: biohacking into the nature mainframe and leaving eldritch comments in the engine’s source. what the fuck is a “stable release”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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