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Fossils retain microscopic structural features including stomach contents and provide first detailed evidence in Australia for fish called Osmeriformes

Some male octopuses tend to get eaten by their sexual partners, but male blue-lined octopuses avoid this fate with help from one of nature’s most potent venoms

Imagine you lived in the 1800s, before radio or TV. How were you entertained? You had theater, and parades, and books. And, once or twice a year, (depending on where you live) a circus would come through your town.

I am endlessly fascinated by the history of the circus, in the US and around the world and just had to share this collection of poster art I came across.

If you were a kid in a small, rural town, how could you not be excited to see these posters go up in your town?

Circuses had all sorts of terrible practices and it's good we've moved on from them mostly now, but looking back, I find this all really interesting.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26885166

Discussion:

And learning from the mistakes of others (part added by OP)....

Via article:

Tl;dr: they did way more squats than their normal routine. Their muscles released too much of a toxin (dead muscle fibers via rhabdomyolysis) and caused kidneys to not be able to get rid of all it needed to, causing kidney damage/failure. This doesn't always happen if a person is regularly engaged in intense exercise.

So when the article mentioned that they "Weren't used to exercising in general"

My first reaction was:

Talk about overestimating your capabilities. Good reason to point out that everyone has limits and in order to push those limits, one needs to work up to it.

So I decided to reflect:

There is much to be said about these kinds of things

"It's said that a wise person learns from his mistakes. A wiser one learns from others' mistakes. But the wisest person of all learns from others' successes." -John C. Maxwell.

While it is always advantageous to learn something from our mistakes, we have to discern when to learn from someone else's mistakes or another's success. Because someone with experience is said to have made a series of mistakes, learned from them and can therefore tell us the multiple things that we shouldn't do, based on what they are doing, successfully. We ask ourselves, or them, why they do something a certain way and not another, and are often met with the answer or discovery that it doesn't work that way, or it is less efficient. So, we trust those with experience over knowledge, because of this and the fact that experience is more often than not, knowledge applied, tested and proven.

This doesn't mean to always observe how another succeeds in a given task. There are times such as this article which illustrate the invaluable wisdom gained when we observe, note and apply what we learn from the mistakes of others. This also does not place any hierarchy on the three; both learning from our mistakes, other's mistakes and other's successes, as well as our own successes, can be equally invaluable. What is foolish is relying solely on one of these methods, and always ignoring the rest.

"The 1000-squat challenge is a fairly common challenge" but the lesson is to know that those who do it have some sort of regular exercise, and generally have healthy enough bodies to withstand and endure such. It is also noted that this instance is rare, but moreover just because there is a low likelihood, doesn't mean one should go about it unprepared, or unready.

In my early twenties, I had gained a significant amount of weight. Naively, I went right in to exercise apps with challenges, after being somewhat sedentary for a few years. I hadn't realized then, just how out of shape I was. Of course, I wasn't able to really complete them at first which was lucky for me, I might have sprained something or twisted another. I made a slow and steady approach after that.

Over the years, I learned just how important gradual improvement and intensity was. Not only is it great to start small when exercising, but in almost any other endeavor. Granted, there can be exceptions, but for the most part "one small step" can be a much more fortified and safe strategy, when gradually working up to "one giant leap" than just jumping directly in the deep end. We tend to expose ourselves to much more problems that way.

Everyone has their own strategy and there truly is not a right or wrong answer, just evidence based on the observation and experiences of oneself and others. Overall, if something becomes too challenging, and perseverance seems like it isn't enough, a change of perspective might help such as breaking one's goal into smaller and smaller steps to the right difficulty for them.

People find AI more compassionate and understanding than human mental health experts, a new study shows. Even when participants knew that they were talking to a human or AI, the third-party assessors rated AI responses higher.

If code that can be directly compiled and executed may be suppressed under the DMCA ... but a textual description of the same algorithm may not be suppressed, then where exactly should the line be drawn?

Eye injuries that damage the cornea are usually irreversible and cause blindness. But a new clinical trial has repaired this damage in patients thanks to a transplant of stem cells from their healthy eyes.

From Jeff Atwood, co-creator of Stack Overflow and Discourse.

A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront where we’ve been, where we are, and who we want to be.

"How noise complaints in a Manhattan co-op led to a $750,000 legal settlement and shattered a friendship.", but that doesn't quite sell the sheer craziness.

Study shows that male partners can help in limiting recurrence of the condition afflicting almost one in three women

If you stub your toe or slam your finger in a door, there’s a good chance the first thing out of your mouth is a four-letter word. But although swearing is a near-universal feature of language, it is still considered taboo by many.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20250305084335/https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/03/05/swearing-pain-tolerance-strength-science/

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The largest study yet of the ISS’s microbes hints we’re may be keeping it too clean.