me trying to convince myself that the whole spectrum of human emotions is a good and necessary thing to feel even if its not comfortable while im actively experiencing emotions that make me feel like my bones are being dissolved in acid

Blue Coral Snake (Calliophis bivirgatus flaviceps), family Elapidae, Singapore

Venomous.

photograph by Ethan Lai

who up experiencing emotions they can talk to no one about

me

people are not thinking about you as much or in the ways you think they are

happy 17 year cicadas

(backseating you at the mortar and pestle) man you aint even squarshing it

License to Kitty.

Beaded insects

hey man I found a piece of your soul stuck in the text messages of old friends you don’t speak to anymore. do you want it back

Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites