Spyglassrealms - Spyglass Realms

I made this shirt for a friend last year after discussing this exact factoid;

TIL astronaut Jack Schmidt discovered he was allergic to moon dust, which is a thing millions of other people have probably gone their whole lives never knowing.

Fresh news from Hubble, and it's a real doozy this time: it found a runaway supermassive black hole.

Let me repeat that:

A runaway SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE.

Half the universe away, an immense object born of concentrated primordial chaos, so powerful it once bound an entire galaxy together, hurtles through the intergalactic void. Its flight through the cosmos so unfathomably violent that it leaves a stream of newborn stars two hundred thousand lightyears long whirling in its wake. Gas and dust in the space between galaxies is spread so thin a particle might never touch another for a million years, and yet this escaped galactic core has dragged the matter in its path into fusion.

What a universe we live in!

How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas

Thrips are tiny insects, typically just a millimeter in length. Some are barely half that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’ egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.

That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale. Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp – complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is actually smaller. At just 200 micrometers (a fifth of a millimeter), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive* and a miracle of miniaturization.

The wasp has several adaptations for life at such a small scale. But the most impressive one of all has just been discovered by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University, who has spent many years studying the world’s tiniest insects.

Read the full article here!

* The world’s second smallest insect is a close relative of M. mymaripenne called Megaphragma caribea, slightly smaller at 170 micrometers. The record holder is yet another wasp – Dicopomorpha echmepterygis. The males, blind and wingless, are just 130 micrometers long. The females are slightly bigger than M.caribea.

mentally i am here

Bustle

Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?

Boundaries are important. But our relationships require a touch more compassion than some online blueprints offer.

brb gonna go on a spiral thinking abt this all weekend (bc i think its insanely true)