Girls Night.. 💅

lady gaga's joe calderone persona is like IT for me like she gets it she understands everything i feel she's the moment she's everything i want to be

11-Year-Old Girl: "I got pregnant from being raped. I need an abortion."

Conservative Dipshit: "Absolutely not! Life is sacred! You must do whatever you can to save the life of your unborn baby!

11-Year-Old Girl: "I'm not in the best situation to be able to do that. If saving lives is so important to you, I'm willing to donate blood.

Conservative Dipshit: "You can't do that. You're too young. It's not safe. You don't know what effect donating blood could have on your body. You should wait until you're older for that."

11-Year-Old Girl: "Do you even hear yourself?"

nature.com

Stressed plants ‘cry’ — and some animals can probably hear them

Microphones capture ultrasonic crackles from plants that are water-deprived or injured.

Plants do not suffer in silence. Instead, when thirsty or stressed, plants make “airborne sounds,” according to a study published today in Cell1.

Plants that need water or have recently had their stems cut produce up to roughly 35 sounds per hour, the authors found. But well-hydrated and uncut plants are much quieter, making only about one sound per hour.

The reason you have probably never heard a thirsty plant make noise is that the sounds are ultrasonic — about 20–100 kilohertz. That means they are so high-pitched that very few humans could hear them. Some animals, however, probably can. Bats, mice and moths could potentially live in a world filled with the sounds of plants, and previous work by the same team has found that plants respond to sounds made by animals, too.

Crying crops To eavesdrop on plants, Lilach Hadany at Tel-Aviv University in Israel and her colleagues placed tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) and tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) plants in small boxes kitted out with microphones. The microphones picked up any noises made by the plants, even if the researchers couldn't hear them. The noises were particularly obvious for plants that were stressed by a lack of water or recent cutting. If the sounds are pitched down and sped up, “it is a bit like popcorn — very short clicks”, Hadany says. “It is not singing.”

Plants do not have vocal cords or lungs. Hadany says the current theory for how plants make noises centers on their xylem, the tubes that transport water and nutrients from their roots to their stems and leaves. Water in the the xylem is held together by surface tension, just like water sucked through a drinking straw. When an air bubble forms or breaks in the xylem, it might make a little popping noise; bubble formation is more likely during drought stress. But the exact mechanism requires further study, Hadany says.

The team produced a machine-learning model to deduce whether a plant had been cut or was water stressed from the sounds it made, with about 70% accuracy. This result suggests a possible role for the audio monitoring of plants in farming and horticulture.

To test the practicality of this approach, the team tried recording plants in a greenhouse. With the aid of a computer program trained to filter out background noise from wind and air-conditioning units, the plants could still be heard. Pilot studies by the authors suggest that tomato and tobacco plants are not outliers. Wheat (Triticum aestivum), corn (Zea mays) and wine grapes (Vitis vinifera) also make noises when they are thirsty.

Chattering grasses? Previously, Hadany’s team has also studied whether plants can ‘hear’ sounds, and found that beach evening-primoses (Oenothera drummondii) release sweeter nectar when exposed to the sound of a flying bee2.

So are plant noises an important feature of ecosystems, influencing the behaviour of plants and animals alike? The evidence isn’t yet clear, according to Graham Pyke, a retired biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who specializes in environmental science.

He’s sceptical that animals listen to the moans of stressed plants. “It is unlikely that these animals are really able to hear the sound at such distances,” he says. He thinks the sounds would be too faint. Further research should shed more light on the matter. But Pyke says he’s perfectly willing to accept that plants ‘squeal’ when stressed.

It's almost incredible how every single sexist stereotype men throw at us isn't just patently untrue but also straight up projection. Like the bad driver stereotype, projecting so hard that even insurance companies recognize it, or the stereotype that women talk more, when every single studies show that men talk more, they just perceive women as talking more as soon as they do 1/3 of the talking.

So here's a new one. As a woman you might have observed it already, I'd say it's especially glaring in split finances couples with children, most that I know the guy's income is just for him but the woman's is hers and the kids'. So here, confirmed.

(the extract is from The Cost of Sexism / The Double X Economy by Linda Scott, and the mentioned report can be found in Gilman and Lawson, The Power of the Purse)

School girls remove their hijabs and chant “death to the dictator” while stomping on the photos of their rulers..

Is the Dictator seeing and hearing all this?

idk, i still support art vandalism. burn the mona lisa.

Being a mom and an anarchist and trying to figure out the whole "parenting" song and dance from that perspective makes me think 8-year-olds have about got it figured out. I hate school. I hate tests. I hate bedtime.

Things you can make from old, dead laptops