jacomuller
2.4K posts

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@elonmusk this will be a great testing ground for your Mars technology.
Robert King@realRobertCK
Elon Musk has the chance to do the funniest thing.
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jacomuller retweetledi

@tedcruz Not only are they tough buggers, they're quite innovative too. Ever heard the story of Stoffel the Honeybadger that keeps on escaping from the sanctuary?
legendsandlegaciesofafrica.org/stoffel.php
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@anishmoonka Not only are they tough buggers, they're quite innovative too. legendsandlegaciesofafrica.org/stoffel.php
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A 15-pound honey badger can survive a cobra bite that would kill a full-grown man in under two hours. Then it finishes eating the snake. A biology grad student at the University of Minnesota wanted to know how. She needed badger blood to find out, and the only samples she could get were from two American zoos in San Diego and Indiana.
What she found in the DNA was one tiny change. There's a small socket on your muscle cells that your nerves plug into to tell your muscles to move. Cobra venom kills you by jamming that socket shut, so your lungs stop working. The honey badger's socket has a swapped-out amino acid that gives it a positive electrical charge. Cobra venom is also positively charged. Like magnets pointing the wrong way, the venom gets pushed off before it can lock in, and the muscles keep firing.
The same workaround showed up separately in hedgehogs and pigs. Mongooses got there too, with a slightly different molecular trick. Four different animals with no shared ancestor all arrived at the same solution because venomous snakes kept biting them for millions of years.
That only covers snakes like cobras and mambas. Puff adders work differently, destroying tissue instead of paralyzing muscle, and the DNA trick doesn't help there. So when a puff adder lands a solid bite, the badger collapses into a kind of coma for two or three hours. Then it wakes up groggy and eats the snake anyway.
The skin is maybe the unfairest part of all this. It's about a quarter inch thick, rubbery, and so loose it fits like a wetsuit two sizes too big. A lion can clamp its jaws on a honey badger and the badger will twist halfway around inside its own skin and start clawing the lion's face while still in its mouth. Bee stingers barely get through. Porcupine quills don't either.
Which brings us back to the bees in that photo. They're annoying. A few sneak through to the face, and enough stings have killed honey badgers in the wild. Honey badgers still die. But they're running three different defense systems at the same time, and one of them is a genetic lottery ticket evolution has pulled four times.
Science girl@sciencegirl
The honey badger doesn’t care
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Many a truth spoken here. Enjoyed this read.
Johann Biermann 🇿🇦@JohannBiermann1
Super read on this Saturday morning.
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jacomuller retweetledi

If you’re Irish, English, French or from New Zealand: Chasing the Sun 1 and 2.
shepuchibhaji@shepuchibhaji
hi can anyone recommend a movie that will emotionally destroy me I want to be sobbing uncontrollably and questioning my existence
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jacomuller retweetledi

Microsoft Word forgets whether you've specified English American, English UK, or English Australian. It gives you the option to make one of these the default. You duly make it the default and it duly forgets your choice. It's done this since it got going, 45 years ago. And it's still doing it.
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@jacomuller True that :) Was more referring to having something stolen.
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Very little use for snowboards in Cape Town
Armand du Plessis@armanddp
Tonight me and my friend had our snowboards stolen in St Anton. In 15 years living in Cape Town I’ve never had that happen to me,
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jacomuller retweetledi

.... or have your personal finance software update automatically from your @FNBSA accounts....
Thendo Muloiwa@MuloiwaThendo
It's 2026 we have Artificial Intelligence everywhere and yet you can't download a proof of payment on the FNB Banking App.
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Citadel Securities published this graph showing a strange phenomenon.
Job postings for software engineers are actually seeing a massive spike.
Classic example of the Jevons paradox. When AI makes coding cheaper, companies actually may need a lot more software engineers, not fewer.
When software is cheaper to build, companies naturally want to build a lot more of it. Businesses are now putting software into industries and tools where it was simply too expensive before.
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Chart from
citadelsecurities .com/news-and-insights/2026-global-intelligence-crisis/

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Given current macroeconomic circumstances, @Apple consistently ensuring backwards compatibility of their new products
Aaron@aaronp613
BREAKING: Apple has confirmed that the Polishing Cloth is compatible with the new MacBook Pros, Air, and Studio Display models 2 updates in a row, this product can truly do it all
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