lisatelramor

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Bill Nye explains why he always wears bow ties. [video/image via jakealc1]

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Norse sails loomed off the shores of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, along the northeastern coast of Great Britain, on June 8, 793. The seafaring invaders sacked the island’s undefended monastery.

The Viking Age had begun.

For more than 270 years, the sight of red-and-white-striped Viking sails heralded an incoming raid. Those mighty sails that drove the explorers’ ships were made by craftspeople, mostly women, toiling with spindles and looms.

“There would have been no Viking Age without textiles,” says archaeologist Eva Andersson Strand, director of the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen, in old Viking territory.

Yet textiles have not received much attention from archaeologists until recently. Andersson Strand is part of a new wave of researchers — mostly women themselves — who think that the fabrics in which people wrapped their bodies, their babies and their dead were just as important as the clay pots in which people preserved food, or the arrowheads with which hunters took down prey.

These researchers want to know how ancient spinners and weavers, from Viking territory and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East, fashioned sheep’s coats into sails — as well as diapers, shrouds, tapestries and innumerable other textiles. Since the Industrial Revolution, when fabric crafts migrated from hearth to factory, most people have forgotten how much work it once required to create a tablecloth or wedding veil, or 120 square meters of sailcloth to propel a longboat across the water.

Textile making is “one of the major industries, and always has been,” says Lise Bender Jørgensen, an archaeologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Today, the annual global market for yarns and fabrics is worth nearly $1 trillion.

Before the 1764 invention of the mechanical spinning jenny, people twisted fibers — flax or wool, for example — together by hand to spin a strong thread. The person doing the spinning would pinch a few strands from a mass of fibers and hook it to a hand-length stick called a spindle. A small, round weight, called a whorl, helped the spindle turn. By dangling the turning spindle, the spinner could twist the fibers into long threads.

Katrin Kania, a textile archaeologist based in Germany, shows how a spinner makes thread. Here, she pinched a bit from a mass of fibers, attaching it to the spindle in her right hand. A whorl at the spindle’s bottom helps the tool spin and create thread. CREDIT: KARL-FRIEDRICH PFEIFFER

Weavers then attached these threads to a loom, crisscrossing the fibers. That mesh could be loose and open, or tight and dense, depending on the fabric desired.

People have been using fibers for millennia, for string and rope as well as thread, and probably started spinning around the fourth millennium B.C., says Margarita Gleba, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. Loom-based weaving, which evolved from basketry, happened as early as the seventh millennium B.C. in Turkey. Back then, the threads were made by splicing.

The ancient textile industry has been difficult to study. Unlike pottery or arrowheads, organic textiles rapidly degrade. Archaeologists interested in what people wove and wore in the past make do with scraps of material preserved by luck — for example, if the fabric happened to be buried in bogs or salt mines.

While some researchers have analyzed the bits of fabric they can find, Andersson Strand is more interested in the production process and its context — the cultural and economic impact. She wants to know what life was like for the people who made textiles thousands of years ago. How much of women’s time was taken up with spinning and weaving? Did textile workers specialize in one part of the process? And did techniques vary by culture?

To understand the work of European spinners and weavers from centuries past, she has turned to the remains of tools that once created those fabrics. Made of clay, stone or bone, the whorls that twirled the spindles and the loom weights that kept the threads taut during weaving are abundant at many archaeological sites.

Andersson Strand uses experimental archaeology to learn what kind of threads and fabrics — fine or coarse, dense or airy — would result from different tools. Her findings are helping archaeologists infer from the leftover tools what textiles people might have created and traded.

“She’s really made the textile tools speak,” Bender Jørgensen says. But not all scholars agree that the tools determine the fabric. Some researchers suggest that the individual crafter, inaccessible to archaeologists, was a more important factor in how spun threads turned out.

[lisatelramor]

Whumpril 2025 - Day 8 - Burnout

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do genuinely find it fascinating how indeed.com is like the biggest job-hunting website out there and yet manages to be profoundly useless in every possible way

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Expelled from Word, he is now trying to contact you through other programs...

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Some Poké babies

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They/them pussy

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roll the bones

Kiss Art February 3 - “Ondine” by Irma Martin (c. 1842)

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Some haunted hyacinths ✨🪻

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"ᴵ ˡⁱᵏᵉ ⁱᵗ ᵉᵛᵉʳ ˢᵒ ᵐᵘᶜʰ ʷʰᵉⁿ ʸᵒᵘ'ʳᵉ ᶜʰᵉᵉʳᶠᵘˡ, ˢᵒʳᵃ. ᵂᵉˡˡ, ᴵ ʷᵒⁿ'ᵗ ᵇᵉ ˢᵃᵈ, ᵇᵉᶜᵃᵘˢᵉ ʸᵒᵘ'ˡˡ ᵃˡʷᵃʸˢ ᵇᵉ ʳⁱᵍʰᵗ ʰᵉʳᵉ

ᶠᵒʳᵉᵛᵉʳ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵉᵛᵉʳ." 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶ

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very much enjoying season zero so far

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tbh i like that more and more games are introducing a "narrative mode" instead of an "easy difficulty", cause a big thing about the easy mode discourse was centered around "are people capable of playing hard games", which showed a lot of elitism and sometimes ableism, but with the introduction of "narrative mode", it completely shifts the paradigm away from "hard mode is for real gamers, easy mode is for noobs" and towards "this is just the game mode for you to experience the story", which not only smooths over that problem, but also enables devs to really rethink how they want to approach designing their game and telling a story to their audience, which i think adds in a lot of possibilities beyond just "is the game easy or hard"

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Someone in that poll said not to watch naruto bc it's queerbait and I hate to tell you this but naruto wasn't trying to queerbait you it's actually the number 1 example of "text is so misogynistic it becomes gay"

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BJ has a very clear understanding of Objectives unfortunately he lacks that level of comprehension when it comes to tactics methods procedures etc. Thus: his Behaviors.

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"Tim Friede’s YouTube channel is home to a collection of videos depicting the Wisconsin-native truck mechanic subjecting himself to purposeful snake bites, blood slowly dripping down his arms.

For the past 20 years, Friede has been one of the most notorious “unconventional” medical researchers, undergoing over 200 bites from the world’s deadliest snakes — and more than four times as many — 850 — venomous injections. 

He did it all in the name of science.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 100,000 people are killed by snake bites each year, with countless more being disabled by the venom of the deadly reptiles. 

While life-saving anti-venom is available, very few countries actually have the capacity to produce it properly, given that most bites occur in remote and rural areas, and anti-venom requires arduous sourcing and accuracy. 

But Friede’s blood is now full of antibodies, following decades of strategic exposure to the neurotoxins of mambas, cobras, and other lethal slithering critters.

His blood is now the source material researchers are using to develop an anti-venom capable of neutralizing a broad spectrum of snake bites...

Friede started this hobby — which he is indeed adamant no one else tries at home — out of sheer curiosity in childhood. After playing with harmless garter snakes in his youth, he began keeping more dangerous species of snakes as pets. At one point, he had 60 of them in his home basement.

In 1999, he began extracting venom from his snakes, drying it, diluting it, and injecting himself with tiny doses — keeping meticulous records as he went.

He had one major hospitalization in 2001, when he was paralyzed and in a coma for four days. But instead of giving up, he doubled down. 

“In hindsight, I’m glad it happened,” Friede told The Times. “I never made another mistake.”

Jacob Glanville, an immunologist and founder of biotech company Centivax, stumbled on Friede’s videos.

Now, Friede is the director of herpetology at Centivax and serves as something of a “human lab” to Glanville.

“For a period of nearly 18 years, [Tim] had undertaken hundreds of bites and self-immunizations with escalating doses from 16 species of very lethal snakes that would normally a kill a horse,” Glanville told The Guardian.

“It blew my mind. I contacted him because I thought if anyone in the world has these properly neutralizing antibodies, it’s him.”

To develop the new anti-venom, Glanville and his fellow researchers identified 19 of the world’s deadliest snakes — in the elapid family — which kill their prey by injecting neurotoxins into their bloodstream, paralyzing muscles (including the big, important ones, like the heart and lungs).

The trouble is, each species in the elapid family has a slightly different toxin, meaning they would each require their own anti-venom.

But Friede’s blood contains certain fragments of each of these toxins; protein molecules seen across the various species. Because of his decades of service to science, his blood also contains the antibodies required to neutralize these toxins, preventing them from sticking to human cells and causing harm.

Combining the antibodies LNX-D09, SNX-B03, and a small molecule called varespladib that inhibits venom toxins, Centivax has successfully created a treatment effective against the entire range of 19 species’ toxins.

Their work, which was recently published in the journal Cell, will soon be tested outside of the lab. 

Trials will start with using the serum to treat dogs admitted to Australian veterinary clinics for snake bites. Assuming that goes well, the next step will be to administer human tests.

Researchers also believe that because the serum stems from a human, this should also lower the risk of allergic reactions when being administered to other people. 

“The final product would be a single, pan-anti-venom cocktail,” Professor Peter Kwong of Columbia University, a senior author of the study, told The Times.

Or, he added, they could make two: “One that is for the elapids, and another that is for the viperids, because some areas of the world only have one or the other.”

As for Friede, he maintains his affinity for snakes, though his last bite was in November 2018, when he said “enough is enough,” according to The New York Times.

By then, he had certainly done enough. His pursuit of immunity could feasibly save countless lives.

“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity,” Friede told The New York Times, “to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably.”

-via GoodGoodGood, May 2, 2025