idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol
One time when I was younger I was refusing to take headache medicine and my mom said “the person who invented that medicine is probably so sad you won’t let them help you” and now every time I find myself denying medicine I just imagine the saddest scientist making those big wet eyes like “why won’t you let me help” and whoop then I take the medicine
Get hot water, not boiling hot but almost hotter than you can stand, and put a metal spoon in it for a few seconds. Take the spoon and put it against the mosquito bite for about 30 seconds. Do it a few times if you like. The proteins that cause the itching are susceptible to heat and break down.
WHY DON’T THEY TEACH THIS SHIT I have four decades of suffering from skeeter bites behind me
One study on 146 individuals treated with a Bite-Away heat pen found similarly effective results from heat treatment; thankfully, spoons dunked in water cost way less than the Bite-Away’s 30 bucks.
You can also blast the bite with a hair dryer - learned this from my mom and it works great
“Leonard Nimoy, who played the most famous TV scientist of all time, Mr. Spock, came from an arts and theater background and in real life is nothing like his character. Yet he told me that because Mr. Spock and “Star Trek” have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, ‘Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.’”
Mary Soon Lee, from Elemental Haiku: Poems to Honor the Periodic Table, Three Lines at a Time
A guinea pig partaking in an experiment to test guinea pigs' reactions to music
By: Unknown photographer
From: Caring for Gerbils and Other Small Pet
1970
In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.
The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.
~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22
