Boooooop

Thinking about those jellyfish that were born in space. They were sent up by one space agency or another to see whether jellyfish born in space would be able to sense "up" and "down" when they returned to Earth.

They weren't. They had to do jellyfish physical therapy.

These are some of my designs on Redbubble. If anyone wants to take them and add leftist, pro-peace, or anti-fascist slogans is more than welcome to. I think the Tiger Salamander saying "F*** Ice," for example, would be cool, but I don't know how to add text on a design already uploaded to Redbubble.

At one point, my great great great grandfather was living in my family's car.

Or, I should say, haunting. I know now that I should say "haunting," from the experience of not doing so.

When I was a freshman in college, I was hanging out with some friends at the Newman Center and shooting the breeze. I don't remember how this came up, but I said "Yeah, my great-great-however-many-greats grandfather lives in our station wagon."

I don't know if I was expecting any response, but I was not expecting the response I got, which was a chorus of "why?" and "that's horrible!"

I thought, perhaps, I hadn't been clear. I thought, perhaps, that they had missed the multiple "greats" in my description and thought we were forcing an elderly relative to live in the car.

My grandfather died during his sister's funeral.

Not "at the same time, but in a different place." Not "while in town for the funeral." He straight-up died AT the cemetary.

I don't quite understand how he died, so I keep wanting to lie. I want to tell people, when they ask, a story that makes more sense to my brain.

"He fell in the hole," I want to say, or "the ghosts got him, you have to be careful around gravestones, ya know."

I don't, because there are always people around who would mind, people who would be upset, and I don't want to upset anyone.

So, I've mentioned before that I am working toward a master's degree in wildlife biology. I'm in a research class and today we had to analyze an article on a topic of interest from our online library. The article had to follow some guidelines, like being published within the last 12 months and involving an actual quantitative or qualitative experiment.

I went to UNI-search and first searched for “Lazarus taxon,” because I think the science there is cool, but there weren’t any experimental results. Then I searched for “endlings,” because they have sad and interesting stories, and there were no results- which is fair because I doubt they would have been experiments anyway. Then I searched for “homing instinct” in the hopes of finding research into the effects-if any- climate change has had on the homing behavior of species with homing behavior (yes, I was going to filter the search to include climate change, but after the previous null result I wanted to start with a broad search).

There were, again, no results, but instead of leaving me with a blank page, UNI-search said, “hey, here’s a related article you might like” and gave me this one: Li, B., Hu, Y., Wang, L., Dong, Z., Liu, C., Xu, J., Wu, X., & Song, H. (2026). Therapeutic Effect of Human Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stromal Cells Loaded With miR‐9‐5p on Hypoxic‐Ischemic Brain Damage in Neonatal Rats. Brain & Behavior, 16(2), 1–10. https://doi-org.unity.idm.oclc.org/10.1002/brb3.71282 (TW: the methods section. They got better, because the science worked, but...the methods section).

Ecology poster, centered around the same mouse.