Six Foot Long Scorpions
There was a super interesting article in the SF Chronicle today about scorpions. It profiled Lauren Esposito, an arachnologist at the California Academy of Sciences, and her work studying these creatures. The venom found in some species of scorpions has been used to provide us with insights in fighting disease and developing opioid free pain relief. She discussed how original scorpions were over six feet long. Can you image?
It all began, she said, about 450 million years ago, when the ancestors of scorpions became the first arthropods to leave the sea. At the time, they were monsters, up to 6½ feet long, with stingers to match.
Source: Bay Area scientist stung by public’s perception of scorpions as scary scourge - SFChronicle.com
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Using cgit
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- Making cgit Pretty
- Lev Lazinskiy
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
- The circus freaks of open source from Drew DeVault's blog
- Clanker: A Word For The Machine from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
“Microsoft’s most ambitious attempt to reinvent the start screen”
From Marton Barcza at TechAltar, a good 12-minute video analyzing what went wrong with the famed Live Tiles that Microsoft was pushing throughout most of the 2010s: Now, among Windows Phone fans the pervasive opinion is that Live Tiles have failed because...
via Unsung August 6, 2026Is Substack good or bad? Yes
If you aren't a writer or a journalist or someone else who cares deeply about platforms for writing and publishing, this week's newsletter probably isn't going to be that interesting for you. As I put it in a previous Torment Nexus newsletter about Substac...
via The Torment Nexus August 6, 2026Generated by openring