Glacier Mice
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
> they have been observed in Alaska, Chile, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Uganda and Venezuela
Well, today I learned, Venezuela has glaciers.
Then I googled that, and…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/...
And so today I learned, Venezuela used to have glaciers.
I don't know if any would be a Venus scenario, probably not. But we don't really need that much warming to kill ourselves off. Average global temps in the Eucene were up to double what they are today, that would do the job :)
A sad search later:
"projected to vanish entirely in late 2026 or 2027"
They're at 4600m in elevation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carstensz_Glacier
They've apparently disappeared and returned a few times since the last iceage.
There have been a few in Africa in modern times. Some of them have disappeared.
https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
(Edit: Here is the direct link to the RSS feed):
https://www.mostdiscussed.com/feed/new
I also have a automatic bridge to Mastodon:
https://mastodon.social/@MostDiscussed
If you have feedback please share it with me.
For the Mastodon bridge I use Mastofeed:
I can't tell, did Glacier Mice make the cut? On a first pass, I don't see it.
https://www.mostdiscussed.com/article/453137
The article was originally published on 2026-08-24 (probably tampered by HN for a second chance), so currently it's on position #6 on the news feed.
The number of US companies I support is usually queried, and I do avoid several of them too.
It's certainly tested my will more than more than I expected - Kagi is an amazing search.
The river dries up rapidly in the summer, leaving the smooth exposed bedrock riverbed peppered with rounded river rocks covered with drying algae.
Where the river is partially shaded, the rocks rapidly grow moss and other vegetation on their top surface. They preserve what little precipitation there is, and catch the morning dew. They grow top heavy, and fall over. They then repeat this on the next upwards facing surface. Meanwhile the downwards facing surface dries out from the radiant heat from the bedrock and shrivels into a thin black layer of desiccated biomass, which then partially falls off at the next rotation, further increasing the top-heaviness.
Over the course of a summer, the rocks all collect themselves into the local low-points of the river bed.
Then comes the flood and the cycle repeats.
You would think a timelapse video would also demonstrate that, and be much simpler to set up.
Wow, that's nuts!
e.g. even the development of eyeballs started with a slightly photoreceptive skin cell and then evolution hill climbing took care of the rest.
It explores precisely this topic: the emergence of unexpectedly rich, complex behaviors from very simple rules given feedback and sensitivity to initial conditions.
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71851/deep-simplici...
> "Mima" is a name derived from a Chinook Jargon term meaning "a little further along or "downstream".
To keep the random learning going, Chinook Jargon [1] is fascinating in itself. A few years ago someone on this site suggested a book called You Can't Win, an autobiography of a reformed hobo/thief/addict written in the 20s. It's fantastic, especially the audiobook version on Spotify. Googling now, I'm seeing it got a (poorly reviewed) movie adaptation this year [2].
Anyway, when locked in a British Colombia jail around the turn of the century, the thief/author used it to communicate with his Chinese cellmate [3]:
> A priest visited the jail one day and gave me a pamphlet on which he had printed the Chinook language. In answer to my question he told me it contained about three hundred words—nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It was created by the Hudson Bay traders, years before, and taught to all the Northwest Indians to simplify trading with the different tribes. […]
> One day he came in with a scared-looking China boy about twenty years old. “Yank, here’s a cellmate for you.” He locked the Chinese in, thinking he was punishing me. The China boy later proved the jailer’s undoing and my deliverance. He knew some Chinook, but not one word of English. I learned from the Indian trusty that he was held for trial, charged with stealing a considerable sum of money from his employer, and that his case was about as hopeless as mine.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon
2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402593/
3. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69404/pg69404-images.ht...
But at the right time of a cold winter day (late evening), at the right place (I saw it in a forest) you can see spiders walking all over the snow hunting.
If you see it in person it's a really weird phenomen. Makes you realize how many spiders there actually are too.