Shockingly, most of these stories relate to how living a sane and healthy life can help keep you sane and healthy. Surprising, I know.
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The marsupial mole, an elusive creature that swims through the sands of remote Australian deserts, seems to have suffered an abrupt population crash about 70,000 years ago, possibly due to climate change.
The elusive Sand Trout!
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Furthermore, the possibility of tuning these properties is demonstrated by adding chitosan (Ch) and borate ions (BB), leading to remarkable mechanical and adhesive performances up to 107 MPa and 280 kPa, respectively, which allows the retrieval of objects from the ejected structure. This process can be finely tuned to achieve a controlled fabrication of instantaneously formed adhesive hydrogel fibers for manifold applications, mimicking living organisms’ ability to eject tunable adhesive functional threads.
This is a long, boring way of saying
THEY INVENTED SPIDERMAN’S WEB SLINGING!!!
They should certainly lead with that!
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The most disturbing part of that article for me was the acknowledgement at the end that they used ChatGPT to help write it. No publication in the BMJ, satire or otherwise, should be using generative AI. But at least they openly acknowledged it, so that’s something I guess.
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The movies are cool, especially the last two, showing items laying on sand being picked up.
Good way to clean the cat’s litter box.
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How many corgis is that?
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But I was lead to believe that ancient humans were carnivorous hunters. No plant matter consumed at all. So the definitely wouldn’t have genes to digest carbs.
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A very fine tree indeed. But I’m not sure by which metric it could compete for “world’s largest.” If you’re going by crown diameter then it doesn’t come close to the Great Banyan Tree in West Bengal, India, which has a crown that’s over twice that diameter. (Banyans cheat by dropping multiple trunks from their braches, but still, they get pretty huge,)
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Fair point. Post edited.
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Still, that is a very cool tree and I wish it well.
But I have to point out Pando. The forest made up of a single tree, that might be more than 10,000 years old:
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Single-trunk crown diameter, maybe? It’s not the tallest, probably not the largest single trunk by volume, diameter or mass.
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Yes, they are aware that they could also find pathogens and are taking precautions.
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Pandora’s glaciers
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Misquoted, and misattributed:
[Now, my own suspicion is that] not only is the universe queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.
—J. B. S. Haldane, (1927) “Possible Worlds”
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The internet misattributed a quote? It’s unpossible! 
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“The biggest problem with sourcing quotes on the internet is that people just make shit up.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 1872
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If you asked an AI to make a portrait of the “head Beatle,” would you’d get a some sort of dreadful hybrid?
With too many fingers of course.
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But what it’s serving up may not always be the latest and greatest. Generally, when a paper is retracted for being invalid, publishers issue an updated version of its PDF with clear indications that the research it contains should no longer be considered valid. Unfortunately, it appears that once Sci-Hub has a copy of a paper, it doesn’t necessarily have the ability to ensure it’s kept up to date. Based on a scan of its content done by researchers from India, about 85 percent of the invalid papers they checked had no indication that the paper had been retracted.
I appreciate the effort to circumvent paywalls to increase access to scientific papers, but if the retracted papers are not noted as such, I’m not sure how helpful this actually is.
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