Writer (on science, travel & curiosity), Yorkshireman, tedious enthusiast, professional overthinker, Megathreader. Now: Scotland. Writes Everything Is Amazing: https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/
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Whattt. I was (/am) a huge fan of this blog. How did I miss this??? Thank you!
😂😂😂😬😬😬 Amazing. And so well-told.
OMG. 😅 I know how that feels, as I did exactly this with a Russell Hobbs electric kettle in an Airbnb I'd just arrived in, in Cadiz.
YIKES. 😬
😂😭
Ha! I'm sure there's an unwritten Jeff Vandermeer novel where this happens.
It’s 1775, & Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele has made a discovery that will go on to delight, entertain and, um, kill a lot of people. Scheele is by any measure a remarkable scientist. A better world might celebrate Scheele’s legacy for what it was. Instead, it gently ridicules it. 1/
I just wrote 14 ways the overcooked blancmange inside your skull is a lot more interesting than an AI chatbot - and if you like reminders about how absolutely *incredible* your brain is, I reckon you might enjoy it: everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/14-ways-yo... Ta.
Please tell me something amazingly but also (in retrospect) entertainingly idiotic that you or someone you know once did. Thx.
I would spend the best part of the next month doing everything I could to clean the marks off the flagstones... But when I sold the family home 30+ years later, you could still see them - like a dark signature written with my reckless stupidity across half the property. 5/
After a minute or two of emitting black smoke, the guttering peeled away from the house with a metallic shriek. Time stood still as I watched it fall with an impressive SLAP! across the full length of the garden path in a stinking, bubbling molten mess. 4/
Ten minutes later, this blossomed into an evil-smelling pillar of white flame that might have been visible from space. Before I managed to throw enough water on it to kill it, the fire licked up the side of our two-storey house... The plastic guttering caught fire. 3/
I went into the garden with some matches, set the diary merrily ablaze, stamped on it a few times to put it out, and threw it in our enormous black plastic bin on the side of the house. Reader, the still-smouldering diary was not, in fact, "put out". 2/
On this day in 19**, I took my teenage diary, which contained my unfiltered yearnings about one very special girl from school (who tragically continued to ignore me), & decided to hide the evidence by burning it. I was a teenager. I knew what I was doing. Nothing could *possibly* go wrong. 1/
Certainly not. But maybe we can agree to disagree about arguing about not arguing.
That's upsetting. Are you sure we can't argue fruitlessly for a while about this?
Amplifying noisy idiots on social media is such a dangerous game: yes, you get to call them out, but you also give them exactly what they want from you. Please amplify this with a RT, share or angrily argumentative quote. Thx.
Happy birthday to Jack Kirby.
In these tumultuous times, let us all hold on tight and continue to support our phenomenal scientists. Scroll to at least 4/ in this thread to watch the video. California is awe inspiring. The Monterey Bay, and the National Marine Sanctuary--6,000+ square miles--is a national, nay, *world* treasure.
"Despite Lack of Federal Support, US Scientists Continue Work on Key Global Climate Reports" by @bberwyn.bsky.social for @insideclimatenews.org: insideclimatenews.org/news/3008202...
Thank you!
Thank you for this, Christina! Fascinating.
My pleasure! Thanks for reading.
Check out this delightful bouquet of facts about the vasty deeps, and for a vertiginously vivid evocation of the Monterey Canyon experience, check out Daniel Kraus's amazing WHALEFALL—soon to be a major motion picture!—in which a diver gets et by a sperm whale, and then things get weird. VHRRI¹!
Here's a relief map of the sea floor - with the vertical scale exaggerated for clarity. But the Monterey Canyon really is on a *massive* scale: walls 1,700 metres (~1 mile) high & by the time it reaches the Pacific’s abyssal plain, it’s run out from California's coast for over 400 kilometres. 2/
Off the top of my head, I do not! But I will go looking.
Their geological origin stories are actually very different! bsky.app/profile/mike... Plus they're a *long* way apart...
Yay! So glad I could pass all this along to you today. :)
If so, I had no idea!
I knew that! Apparently it's why Apple's "Monterey" operating system had a default wallpaper that looked like a big purple canyon
(@goldengateblond.bsky.social - not sure if you know about this already, since it's your corner of the world?)
This is really interesting! Give it a read!
🙏 Thank you, Roger! So kind.
If you’ve ever visited California’s Monterey Bay and looked out over the immensity of the Pacific - well, I hear it’s lovely. But how many of its roughly 4 million visitors per year know that beyond the surf, they’re also in the presence of the second Grand Canyon of the United States? 1/
Oh, fantastic. I'm so glad it's taught at school, and kids have access like that. 😍 Hooray for science teaching working in all the right ways!
That one actually has a more conventional geological explanation: it's at the boundary between two tectonic plates, where one subducts (dives under) the other! The result in this case is the deepest-underwater point on the planet.
And if you enjoyed *that* thread, here's another mindblower of a story I covered a while back: bsky.app/profile/mike... Thanks for reading!
And finally, thanks to everyone at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, whose terrific research I relied upon when putting this thread together: www.mbari.org/know-your-oc... (Everyone working in the Earth Sciences: you deserve better than what's happening to science funding right now.)
If you enjoy big-wow sciencey stuff like this, you may enjoy my science newsletter, Everything Is Amazing! everythingisamazing.substack.com It's totally free to sign up. 9/
Absolutely - and also everyone working for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute! (I relied on their website for a lot of this thread.) But I didn't know it was unusually cold! Thanks for that. Makes sense.
But it's not just Monterey. There are undersea rivers all over the world! Here's the coast of Portugal, where an undersea river flows down a narrow channel inside the five-mile-wide (8km) Nazaré canyon, running out to reach the Atlantic abyssal plain nearly 2.5 miles (4km) beneath the surface. 8/
."...picking up speed & momentum as it moves until it flows like a liquid. Once started, an undersea river can flow for weeks & even months at a time, moving the same amount of sediment in one go than all the world’s land-based rivers transport in an entire year." www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic... 7/
“Rather than flows of fresh (or at least salty) water, undersea rivers are slurries of silt and sand that cascade along channels on the seabed. Each particle tumbles through the water under its own weight. A new river starts on the continental shelf like an avalanche in the mountains..." 6/
In another parallel with the Grand Canyon, it seems to have been carved out by a river... And that river is *still flowing*, under thousands of meters of ocean! Welcome to the weird & wonderful world of UNDERWATER RIVERS. 5/
Courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Scientific American, this is what they’d see if those thousands of vertical metres of ocean hiding it from view suddenly drained away: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgfk... But how did it get this way? 4/
It's not far off being as impressive as the Lomonosov Ridge (which I'm still amazed isn't better known) - bsky.app/profile/mike... But it’s right under the noses of millions of Californians & visitors, unknown to many of them, because of all that fun blue stuff that’s currently in the way. 3/
Here's a relief map of the sea floor - with the vertical scale exaggerated for clarity. But the Monterey Canyon really is on a *massive* scale: walls 1,700 metres (~1 mile) high & by the time it reaches the Pacific’s abyssal plain, it’s run out from California's coast for over 400 kilometres. 2/
If you’ve ever visited California’s Monterey Bay and looked out over the immensity of the Pacific - well, I hear it’s lovely. But how many of its roughly 4 million visitors per year know that beyond the surf, they’re also in the presence of the second Grand Canyon of the United States? 1/
I don't think it's today. But when that day comes, let's all meet on the biggest Zoom call in history and sing this together: www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6cn...
It was wild
"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.
Re-upping this again, please spread far and wide:
Humblebundle to support World Central Kitchen, and get a bunch of my books from @tordotcom.bsky.social including Murderbot and Witch King! #booksky www.humblebundle.com/books/martha...
Good to see @bsky.app has emerged as the social media platform of choice for science stuff arstechnica.com/science/2025...
Thank you so much. 🙂 So glad you enjoyed it (even though yes, it's a proper horror story of a thing)...
You mean "the Ouse is so working-class salt-of-the-earth backbone of Britain", with none of your faux-silver-spooned elitist feckless hobnobbing with royalty behaviour like you'd get with the Foss. The Ouse is Sean Bean. The Foss is Salt Bae.
As a social media commenter I should be hyper-partisan, so: The Foss? That sheep-dropping-spattered upstart of a (King's) pond? Bah. Now the OUSE is a different matter, with its head in York and its feet in't whole world. Many a fortune made along that river. You get nowt but asthma from the Foss.
An absolutely harrowing and important story -- ChatGPT and other chatbots are becoming deeply enmeshed in many people's personal and social lives to an incredible degree, and the consequences can be devastating.
Thank you for your fine work on this, because it must have taken such a heavy toll. Utterly horrifying.
Christ almighty, this is a horrifying story. >>“I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” Adam wrote at the end of March. “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”<<
Yep, by Jeff Vandermeer. I really enjoyed the film, but the books (which differ from the film in many places) are much richer and weirder. A tangle of conceptual thickets to pull you in, until there's no escape.
("Annihilation" and its sequels will forever have a place in my heart, and that place is marked "No Answers, Just Questions". We need more stories like that.)
Carina gets it.
Oh wow. Thank you for all of this! Had no idea...
🙂Thank you, that's immensely kind of you to say.
This beautiful forest is not what it seems. It's a quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) in Utah, nicknamed Pando. It may *look* like a mass of 47,000 aspens, but it’s actually a clonal organism, connected by a root system over 42.8 ha./106 acres. But this is not the wildest thing. 1/ 📷: J Zapell
And so the trilogy is finally complete: bbc.co.uk/news/uk-engl... (Hat-tip Charlene Storey.)
Actually, here's something from a while back that will never not make me laugh: bsky.app/profile/mike...
It's a mad occupational tic that on days like today when I'm up to my ears actually writing stuff, the social-media part of my brain shrieks "COME ON, DO YOUR JOB." So let's both pretend I just posted a long sciencey thread. I hope you enjoyed it. Thx. (Yes, I know this isn't how it works.)
However, no illusion will ever blow my mind like the one at the end of this clip from a children's TV show in the 70s & 80s: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Krp... Honestly. You are NOT going to be able to wrap your head around it. (Explanation: everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/the-room-w...)
These lines are parallel. It's a riff on the classic Café Wall Illusion, first described in 1894 by the splendidly-named Hugo Münsterberg: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%... He called it the "kindergarten illusion" - renamed in 1973 based on a café in Bristol. (H/t Nichol.s.67 on Threads.)
Sorry, Dave's family! 😅
I hear you.
French and Canadian researchers have shown that faulty mitochondria directly drive memory loss in dementia. Using a new tool to boost mitochondrial activity in mice, they restored memory performance, proving cause and effect for the first time. buff.ly/2REM0fd #ShareGoodNewsToo
Read the article explanation here first and then watch the video. So good!
Agree on how reassuring! The adventure of exploring other people's perspectives on our so-called "shared reality" is endlessly interesting. (I've got to stop linking to my own work which is very tedious of me, sorry, but if you didn't see, I just wrote this: bsky.app/profile/mike...)
Thank you for the share! I thought this was the rare illusion that works on absolutely everyone, but someone in another comment says their kid can't see it. Mind blown yet again.
Oh wow. Well, tell them they have a truly amazing brain, because that's one of the few illusions that seems to work on just about everyone! I've never talked to a person who it didn't work on, in fact...
It's how it's so completely impossible to unsee. Normally you can "flip" illusions to see reality at some point. This one? Never.
This feels like a spot of good news www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...
For those unfamiliar: the “brains aren’t fully formed until 25” myth was a misread of a study that measured subjects’ brain dvlpmnt UNTIL age 25 & then the study stopped, & it was misreported as development ending then when really the DATA ends then & past 25 we have no data yet. Misreported science
And if you squint all the lines go straight. 👀
However, no illusion will ever blow my mind like the one at the end of this clip from a children's TV show in the 70s & 80s: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Krp... Honestly. You are NOT going to be able to wrap your head around it. (Explanation: everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/the-room-w...)
These lines are parallel. It's a riff on the classic Café Wall Illusion, first described in 1894 by the splendidly-named Hugo Münsterberg: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%... He called it the "kindergarten illusion" - renamed in 1973 based on a café in Bristol. (H/t Nichol.s.67 on Threads.)
*muffled shriek of agreement from the garden*
Update: a wee correction, mea culpa! bsky.app/profile/mike... *wipes egg off face*
I feel pretty sure the reaction of the gentleman in the video is genuine. But what he’s probably experiencing is colours he could *already* see becoming much sharper and more distinct. It seems that’s something EnChroma glasses *can* do. But they can’t “fix” colour-blindness outright. Mea culpa!
UPDATE: whoops! In this piece I included a video of someone emotionally overcome using EnChroma glasses, which initially claimed to correct colour-blindness. Thanks to a reader I learned this has been convincingly debunked (see links on EnChroma’s Wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnChrom... 1/
Thank you! (And also I hope you know that On Looking was one of the books that inspired me to start my newsletter, so coming from you this means a lot, and also I'm British and can't handle compliments so now I will spend tomorrow face-down in the garden shrieking wildly, but thank you. Gosh.)
Hooray! 👋 Yes, when I first learned that isn't how most people read, I couldn't quite believe it.
That's a really good question - and a really hard one to answer! Part of it seems to be down to a tiny lump of tissue called the hippocampus, which is a kind of "sorting hat" for our memories. When it gets damaged, really weird things happen: everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/the-man-wh...
🥹Thank you. That's so nice of you to say.
You are the kindest. THANK YOU. :)
Wow. This whole article will blow your mind.
I just wrote 14 ways the overcooked blancmange inside your skull is a lot more interesting than an AI chatbot - and if you like reminders about how absolutely *incredible* your brain is, I reckon you might enjoy it: everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/14-ways-yo... Ta.
Okay let's do a quick research thread of bribes hidden inside food or food packaging 1. Easter eggs, Alaska, 2008
Thank you so much, Josh!
My thanks to the generous people at Scientific American, who asked for a piece on the overturning of scientific paradigms and didn't blink when they got a piece about relativity, malaria, surveys of the Great Plains, mammograms, LLMs, climatology, COVID, Back to the Future, and some other stuff.
Oh wow.