Nikki & Lilly

2,300-Year-Old Plush Bird from the Altai Mountains of Siberia (c.400-300 BCE): this artifact was crafted with a felt body and reindeer-fur stuffing, all of which remains intact

This stuffed bird was sealed in the frozen barrows of Pazyryk, Siberia, for more than two millennia, where a unique microclimate enabled it to be preserved. The permafrost ice lense formation that sits just beneath the barrows provides an insulating layer, preventing the soil from heating during the summer and allowing it to quickly freeze during the winter; these conditions produce a separate microclimate within the stone walls of the barrows themselves, thereby aiding in preservation.

A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs.

“At the end of the Last Interglacial, Neanderthals regularly harvested large brown crabs,” said Dr. Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), lead author of the study. “They were taking them in pools of the nearby rocky coast, targeting adult animals with an average carapace width of 16cm. The animals were brought whole to the cave, where they were roasted on coals and then eaten.”

 Cameo Glass Flask

Cameo glass is primarily a product of the early Roman Empire and is specifically associated with the elite and royal of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Its manufacture is therefore mostly limited to the decades around 25 BC-AD 25 and it is rare; less than twenty pieces have survived in their entirety.

The meaningless hieroglyphs on the obelisk as well as the general obscurity of the iconography prevents a specific reading of the narrative. Instead, the figures and motifs would seem to evoke through setting and characterization the exotic Egyptian atmosphere so popular in the art of Julio-Claudian Rome.

It’s not just the meat industry at fault for the mess of factory farming.

Contrary to popular belief, farming crops isn’t perfectly renewable. You can’t just keep planting a crop in the same place year after year and expect viable output— the nutrients in soil are a finite resource that must be replaced by their own natural cycles— think about what would happen if you planted something and never watered it.

No, adding fertilizer isn’t the answer. No, not even manure. Why? Because adding additional nutrients manually, no matter the method, will cause a good portion of those nutrients to run off into our local waterways.

Why is that bad? Well, do you like having fish?

When fertilizer runs off into a waterway, it causes algae blooms. When algae blooms occur, they 1. Block out sunlight to marine plants below the surface, which fish often eat, and 2. They throw the balance of dissolved gasses in the water off. In short, it starves and chokes other marine life to death.

What you need to take away from this is the following:

When you fuck with one part of an ecosystem, you fuck with every part.

Now, back to the issue of labor I raised earlier, because yes, humans are also part of the ecosystem. Your beans, rice, wheat, et cetera are only cheap because they, much like the meat industry, are cultivated in really environmentally destructive ways. They also directly profit from abusive labor practices and human trafficking.

The system of factory farming and industrial agriculture promoted by the green revolution directly harms every part of the ecosystem— yes even the humans it was supposed to help.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

That should not be a comforting thought that absolves you of your guilt.

What you can do is:

learn how to forage in a sustainable way (@blackforager on instagram is a fabulous introduction— but keep in mind foraging is highly specific to your local area)

try to buy from local farmers markets if at all possible

collect seeds. Try to not just buy them since commercial seeds are often engineered to not produce viable seeds for the next growing season. What we want is a self-sustaining crop rotation.

If you aren’t able to garden in the ground, even growing some indoor herbs or simple patio crops can really help— there are great tutorials for patio potato bins, strawberry baskets, and countertop herb gardens out there

If you can garden in the ground, plant in your yard or apply for a community garden plot & use it. Remember to research, research, research.

Also no matter where you are, just stop growing turf grass. Stop seeding your lawn and definitely stop watering it. The weeds that crop up will prevent erosion better, they’ll be softer to walk on, they’ll stay green longer, and you’ll be promoting really important local biodiversity that supports your local birds, bees, and other pollinators.

Now, happy planting, and remember that you are but a speck in geological history. You do not know better than the system that brought you into the world & will take you out of it when your time comes.

Me in my environmental science/studies class:

I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.

I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."

Aaron Swartz would have turned 35 years old this November. Unfortunately, he died by suicide in 2013. There were many things that weighed on him in his final days, but one that was publicly known was the collective pressure from the U.S. Attorney and the federal government.

Swartz was a proactive activist and computer programmer who constantly fought for open access and copyright reform in the cyberspace. In 2010, he created a computer program that would automatically download millions of articles for JSTOR. Swartz was a research fellow at Harvard University, and had a JSTOR account as well as free access to the systems in the MIT campus at the time; he used this access to download millions of academic journal articles on JSTOR with the specific intention to distribute them online in order to be easily accessible to the general public who could not afford to pay the high subscription costs of JSTOR.

Toxicological Investigations in Food by Loai Aljerf in Food science Journal

Since its inception, Novel Techniques in Nutrition and Food Science has published many reports which provided more coherent and varied viewpoints on such subjects, the journal is introducing a new feature under our editorship. Beginning with this issue, and periodically hereafter, the journal will present an evaluation or planning case study along with critiques by relevant researchers or practitioners.Novel Techniques in Nutrition and Food Science has now reached a stage of development meriting its recognition as a leading medium for communicating a wide variety of toxicological investigations. This achievement is due largely to the unstinting efforts of the editorial board, whose resignation will be viewed with considerable regret by past contributors and subscribers. Toxicology as an applied biological science needs no introduction to readers. There is also an increasing realization that toxicological data can have a substantial impact on commercial operations, on regulatory control and legislation and at the level of public concern.

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