Deep underground in a dark, sulfuric cave on the border between Albania and Greece, scientists have made an incredible discovery – a giant communal spider web spanning more than 100 square meters (1,000 sq ft), dense enough to resemble a living curtain, home to an estimated 110,000 spiders.
An international team of European researchers, including scientists from the Czech Speleological Society, came across it while undertaking a wildlife survey in 2022, and were not just taken aback by the size of the multilayered web but what it housed: around 69,000 Tegenaria domestica and 42,000 Prinerigone vagans spiders living side by side in this massive silk structure with an estimated surface area of 106 sq m (1,141 sq ft)
It’s the first time either species has ever been seen living cooperatively, and the first recorded instance of colonial web-building in what’s known as a chemoautotrophic cave.
This cavern, known as Sulfur Cave, houses a chemoautotrophic ecosystem sustained not by sunlight but chemosynthesis – or the process of converting chemical energy into organic matter. Here, sulfur-oxidizing bacteria grow in thick white biofilms on wet rock and sediment. These microbes are then eaten by small invertebrates such as midge larvae and isopods, which are in turn preyed on by larger insects like spiders, beetles, and centipedes. The entire ecosystem is self-contained and independent of external input, running on the energy released when bacteria convert toxic hydrogen sulfide into sulfate.
This remarkable life support system is all thanks to a warm toxic stream that runs through it, with its water a constant temperature of about 26 °C (79 °F) and loaded with dissolved hydrogen sulfide – which gives it its distinctive rotten-egg odor.
President Donald Trump has announced a landmark deal aiming to expand Medicare coverage to include certain weight-loss medications, a move that could dramatically change access to these treatments for millions of older Americans. On November 6, Trump revealed that his administration had struck agreements with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the makers of popular weight-loss drugs including Ozempic and Wegovy, to reduce costs and allow for broader Medicare coverage starting in 2026.
Under the arrangement, prices for GLP-1 drugs—used both for diabetes and obesity—will be slashed for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. The prices of Ozempic and Wegovy will fall from $1,000 and $1,350 per month, respectively, to $350 when purchased through through the TrumpRx.gov website set to launch in January 2026,
A Chinese court has sentenced five top members of an infamous Myanmar mafia to death as Beijing continues its crackdown on scam operations in South East Asia.
In all 21 Bai family members and associates were convicted of fraud, homicide, injury and other crimes, said a state media report published on the court website.
The family is among a handful of mafias that rose to power in the 2000s and transformed the impoverished backwater town of Laukkaing into a lucrative hub of casinos and red-light districts.
In recent years they pivoted to scams in which thousands of trafficked workers, many of them Chinese, are trapped, abused and forced to defraud others in criminal operations worth billions.
Mafia boss Bai Suocheng and his son Bai Yingcang were among the five men sentenced to death by the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court. Yang Liqiang, Hu Xiaojiang and Chen Guangyi were the other three.
Two members of the Bai family mafia were handed suspended death sentences. Five were sentenced to life imprisonment, while nine others were handed jail sentences ranging from three to 20 years.
The Bais, who controlled their own militia, established 41 compounds to house their cyberscam activities and casinos, authorities said.
(The video should have sound but works without it.)
I would add — yes, bikes are dangerous but the danger is overemphasized. I believe it is overemphasized because all healthy men would love to ride but are afraid; and the exaggeration of danger justifies staying away; following that is the echo chamber of uninformed agreement and circular reasoning.
Modern motorcycles are definitely safer than bikes from just two decades ago. They are equipped with many traction and braking safety features. Also, airbag jackets and vests for motorcycles are available and moderately priced.
My very consistent attitude toward motorcycles is I never try to convince anyone to ride and am not doing that now. Right now, I am just setting the record straight, as I see it.
Motorcycling is a very free sport. Most riders are very pleasant, polite men; and they are that way because riding uses and exhausts primal animal hormones, thought and sensory processes, and instincts as they were evolved to be used.
Yes, some women ride and I love them for it, but the sport is mostly men. ABN
I approve of this video and agree with it and also… while she has the basic idea, the actual reality has been far more savage and violent than endocrine disruption alone.
It is difficult to prove a decades long covert assault on an entire civilization, which is why it’s done covertly.
But it is fairly easy for intelligent observers to recognize the patterns of past and ongoing covert operations being conducted against their societies.
Many people can see the soft stuff — mind-control, censorship, propaganda, bribery and blackmail.
The hard stuff—poison, lobotomy, sensory disablement, endocrine disruption and more—is but a step or two beyond that.
You need to think and reason like a ruthless military strategist who is a member of a ruthless ancient cult which has been striving for world domination for thousands of years.
Funding an army of covert operatives dedicated to disabling an entire civilization is not expensive or even difficult to do.
If you infiltrate the target civilization, you can trick them into paying for their demise. ABN
The recognizable ancestor of the IDF is not the Marquis De Sade, a mere sexual deviant, but your common serial killer with added pathological paraphilia, and the ability to industrialize the scale of his crimes.
As I had remarked before, patterns of arousal—the commingling of serial killing and sex—are tied to psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.
Honed in rendition torture camps, sexual violence has become the coin of the Greater Israel realm. A glimpse into Sde Teiman, a torture rendition camp in Israel proper, revealed to the world that Israel has de facto systemized the practice of anally rapturing the bowels of Palestinian prisoners, most detained without charge.
Marquis de Sade, whose name is used to denote things sexually bent, was no murderer. The recognizable ancestor of the IDF is not the Marquis De Sade, a mere sexual deviant, but your common serial killer with added pathological paraphilia, and the ability to industrialize the scale of his crimes.
Paraphiliacs are said to enjoy exhibitionism or masochism or sadism, “in which sexual gratification is derived from activities or fantasies that are generally regarded as atypical or deviant. A paraphilic disorder is present when it causes … “actual or potential harm to others.”
The habitual infliction of rectal rape on Palestinian men has joined the crimes of genocide, the making and mass-marketing of online snuff films featuring murdered Palestinians, and the commission of extra-judicial assassination the globe over. These practices are de facto legal in what passes for law in the Israeli thugocracy.
Sensory damage, maiming, lobotomy, and poison are also techniques used in disabling and humiliating perceived enemies, a term which means everyone else but us in their psychopathological group imagination.
Covert groups, clandestine groups of military operatives, have worked secretly throughout the West for decades disabling, especially, boys and young men.
The strategy is and has been to cripple or kill them while they are still young, thus debilitating their communities and nations.
The results of that strategy are manifestly visible wherever the psychopaths live. ABN
In this post, I want to avoid words like psychology, personality, instinct, normal, abnormal, etc. to describe human beings. I want to throw out all of those usual ways of thinking about people and replace them with just three terms–semiosis, symbiosis, and optimization.
In this context, semiosis means all symbols, meaning, language, philosophy, belief, value, etc. An easy way to grasp semiosis is to equate it with the way an individual’s culture, or subculture, works within their mind. Symbiosis denotes relations to other people. An easy way to grasp symbiosis is to equate it with an individual’s social group(s)–their marriage partner, family, friends, clubs, religious groups, job, etc.
All humans are a combination of some sort of semiosis and symbiosis as defined above. What we want to aim for in our lives is optimization of our semioses and symbioses. The only way I know how to do this is with FIML practice because only FIML practice gives partners the tools to grasp and manipulate—to understand and improve—their semioses.
The main area where this optimization occurs in FIML practice is in the symbiosis of partners’ semioses. Semioses are shared. Partners share in a symbiotic relationship the semioses they both carry around in their heads. FIML partners must become conscious of this level of human interaction because it happens whether you are conscious of it or not. If partners are not conscious of it and/or can’t deal with it, they will not be able to optimize their relationship (or their own lives). Rather, they will be forced to cling to public semiotics, private neuroses, or most commonly both.
If partners are optimizing the symbiosis of their shared semioses, their core behaviors will spring from dynamic principles rather than static codes, vows, or agreements. FIML is nearly contentless in that it does not tell partners what to think but rather how to observe and analyze their shared semioses.
Now, as an example, let’s say you experience a mix-up with your partner. Something didn’t go right; one of you misspoke or did something bothersome; then you had an argument or at least difficult emotions arose. So what should you do? At times like these, many people will separate for a while to cool down and then gloss over whatever it was when they get back together later on. At that point they will rely on some sort of static notion of their relationship and on that basis try to recapture good feelings. This technique works to a point, but it is not the best because it does nothing to optimize the relationship. It just covers up the problem. When you avoid a problem, you underscore your inability to deal with it while allowing it to grow.
A much better way for partners to deal with a problem like the one above is recognize that it is definitely going to affect your shared semiosis. Once you both accept this fact, you will probably find it easier to stick with the issue. Rather than separating for a while, face the issue and start a FIML discussion by analyzing what has happened and why. Even if it takes you an hour or more to reach a resolution, it will be well worth it because you will be optimizing your relationship. By doing a FIML discussion, you will avoid hiding from a problem while profoundly increasing your mutual understanding.
This is how mutual transformation often works in the real world. If you do small things like this enough, both you and your partner will become convinced that you can really live and interact on a higher level than what you probably had thought possible before.
American Buddhist Net 