Things get psychedelic. These are actual illustrations from a paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway. They had Midjourney do the illustrations, and they are spectacular! And confusing and uninformative.

Look at the labels! AIs are terrible at reproducing text in images, and these make no sense…and most of the diagrams are random piles of throbbing circles. What do they mean? I don’t know.

But here’s my very favorite image. What have they done to that poor rat?

The labels…they do nothing! The text of the paper makes sense and is a reasonable discussion of the role of the JAK/STAT pathway in spermatogonial differentiation, but then your eyes wander over to those bizarre illustrations and you get totally discombobulated.

I should print that last picture out in color, and place copies at floor level around my house as a rodent repellent. Except my cat already has a problem with frequent puking.

I’m sorry, but I was up at 5 putting the finishing touches on two exams I’m giving this afternoon, and which I have to get graded by tomorrow morning, because I’m giving a third exam tomorrow, which also has to be graded quickly. I’m in a bit of a haze right now, but I feel a need to comment on this:

Ultra-creepy millionaire Bryan Johnson has increased his creepiness score ten-fold by hooking up a machine to his penis every night to record its unconscious activity, and worst of all, is bragging about it on the internet. He’s spending $2 million per year to try and game aging, getting scores on arbitrary metrics that he can point to and brag that his body parts have different ages.

Now he wants to have the penis of an 18 year old.

He claims he now has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old, and the fitness of an 18-year-old.

I know it’s an old joke, but where does he keep them? In jars on his mantelpiece?

I apologize again. My only excuse is that I’m addled with exhaustion and will be getting no respite until next week.

Hey, I’d look younger than my age if I could spend a few million dollars to hire people to write and grade these exams.

Warning: this is a discovery of a delicate, and some might even say offensive, nature, so I’ve put it below the fold. It’s an ad for a vibrator that you can order from AliExpress, but it will do no human any good — it is clearly designed for an exotic and clearly non-human morphology.

[Read more…]

All right, this is going too far. This is what some people think an octopus skeleton looks like:

They don’t have bones!

Now we get a mangling of spider anatomy:

It’s an exo-skeleton, guys.

As we all know, this is the correct version:

This is clearly a variant on the human centipede.

I’m sorry, but to me the most disturbing part of this story is the buckets.

APennsylvania man has been found with multiple buckets of stolen human body parts that he allegedly purchased off of Facebook, according to police.

East Pennsboro Township Police said that they arrested Jeremy Pauley, 40, of Enola on Thursday after making the discovery while searching his basement. Police said that Pauley is a self-described collector of “oddities” and was in possession of three full human skeletons and up to 20 human skulls, according to ABC affiliate WHTM. He was released soon after posting $50,000 bail.

The investigation began when police received a complaint on June 14 about human remains potentially being sold on Facebook. Suspicion of Pauley’s alleged involvement began after a person called police on July 8 to report finding multiple 5-gallon buckets containing “human organs” and “human skin” in his basement.

Why buckets? Is this a practical way to store your organs? Why? Can you do anything with them, or do you just go down to the basement to gloat over the random viscera floating in your buckets? I mean, I would at least want some classy glass jars, maybe a big vat with multiple organs so you can play with them and assemble them, but this guy’s process is just sloppy and pointless.

I am not at all surprised that Facebook is where you go to buy body parts.

Because this is how you get vampires.

Officials were at first bewildered when they came upon a mysterious ghost ship with no captain or crew on board that had washed ashore on a secluded island off the coast of Cambodia during an intense storm this week.

Cambodian vampires are a little different from the European kind, though: they consist of a floating head with the viscera dangling down below. They are supposed to look like a young and beautiful woman, but an isolated head with a bunch of guts hanging from the neck is a little bit offputting.

Yuck, this abomination is making the rounds again.

I’m going to see my granddaughter tomorrow. Should I bring her one of these? I don’t really want to see her brought up as a serial killer or a Frankenstein…although it does suggest some cool experiments. If we hook it up to the wall socket, can we make it live?

Unfortunately, as vegetarians, neither I nor my daughter have the spare parts to craft one. We’ve got leeks, and onions, and carrots, and asparagus, and broccoli, and mushrooms, though, and I might be able to concoct a vegan nightmare out of all that.

Alas, the chicken teddy is fake news.

The raw chicken teddy bear, which went viral for the first time in 2013, is actually a piece of art by Russian artist Viktor Ivanov, who said at the time, “On the whole, it made me feel disgusted the entire time I was making it.”

He added: “One should not know what it’s like to sew through skin.”

What? I know what it’s like to sew through skin. I had no idea it was a forbidden art.