Quickies
Quickies: A robot octopus, drugs & pee, and bitchface
- Octopus robot makes waves with ultra-fast propulsion – “Scientists have developed an octopus-like robot, which can zoom through water with ultra-fast propulsion and acceleration never before seen in man-made underwater vehicles.”
- Drugs, pee, and me – “You may not realize that the everyday substances you ingest, such as caffeine and painkillers, are biologically active and may have environmental impacts.”
- Why Sanne Cant’s bitchface helps women’s cycling – “One of the impossible, contrary demands placed on the modern woman is to be nice, sensitive, and congenial while chopping a clear path out the jungle of institutional patriarchy.”
- A radical statement – Another great Robot Hugs comic, this time about rape culture.
- Cute Animal Friday! Fairy penguins, perhaps the cutest of the penguins. And from Michael, the first ever photos of African golden cat kittens.
I hate how men are rewarded for being aggressive, assertive assholes, while even a MILDLY assertive woman is smacked down.
In a better world, assholes would be smacked around until they adjusted their attitudes and people with real drive and ambition are rewarded regardless of their sex, and no one demands they spend more time with their kids or questions their ability to serve a company’s interests.
Conservation of anxiety: Just when there are some glimmers of hope of new, radically different antibiotics and increased public awareness of the problem of multiple-antibiotic resistant bacteria (largely due to over-prescription and factory farming), along comes “every drug ever consumed by anyone anywhere is slooowly accumulating in the biosphere and it’s just a matter of time before bad stuff happens.” Crack-addled possums? Really? As if the regular (Aussie) ones aren’t addled enough!
Maybe the cure is 1) testing all new drugs to determine what happens when they are ingested, digested, excreted and then pass through standard waste treatment (to get a handle on the problem each might cause), and 2) create specific remediation for each one that might cause a significant problem. Maybe time-release an enzyme that breaks it down in the same pill as the drug or add a specific tertiary stage to standard treatment plants to deal with it or bio-engineer a little buggy that eats it for lunch or whatever? Or dose the pond slime with speed if they are getting too much depressants or dose it with Valium in areas with lots of meth factories, or both at the same time. What fun!