🕸️ Primitive Hypertext: Microplastics in Semen, Floppy Disks Are Retired in Japan, Synchronized Fruit Dropping Across Europe, Bitcoin Noise Pollution Terrorizes Texas Town, and Greedy Cannibal Stars
🕸️ Microplastics in Semen, Floppy Disks Are Retired in Japan, Synchronized Fruit Dropping Across Europe, Bitcoin Noise Pollution Terrorizes Texas Town, and Greedy Cannibal Stars
Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.
Read more about the newsletter rhythm here.
☺️ Hello!
Table of Contents:
🧳 A Quick Update 🌻
🕸️ Primitive Hypertext (after Octavia Estelle Butler)
🐇 🕳️ Another Rabbit Hole
1. 🧳 A Quick Update 🌻
Finally, I'm back from almost two months of travel under intense heat: Norway to Turkey to New York to Los Angeles to France, and finally, back in Brooklyn to move! In a few days, I will have a fresh new, larger apartment before heading to Joshua Tree, then back to New York for a new job, new place, and just a lot of anxiety-inducing newness. Travel has been hard on this newsletter schedule, but stick with me!
2. 🕸️ Primitive Hypertext (after Octavia Estelle Butler)
As a reminder, the Primitive Hypertext offerings are now modeled after Harper Magazine’s Findings, which focuses on “scientific progress—good, bad, or simply strange.” However, my version will include anything that piques my curiosity in a given week — which most likely will be science-adjacent...but not like always, but mostly 😬 😬
A study of 40 healthy men found microplastics in all 40 semen samples, raising concerns about male fertility and the continued decline in sperm count. After Taro Kono, Japan’s digital minister declared and presumably won its “war on floppy disks,” the national abandonment of the seemingly anachronistic storage system, he has a new target: retiring the fax machine. Masting, or the synchronized production of seeds by plants, is finally seen at a continental scale, with European beeches dropping their fruits simultaneously across several nations. Noise pollution from a newly installed Bitcoin mining facility causes health issues for the residents of Granbury, Texas.
A 2022 study exposed Jupiter as a greedy little planet that “cannibalized baby planets” as it grew, or in a more dramatic summary: “Jupiter's innards are full of the remains of baby planets.” A 2024 study investigating stellar chemical compositions found that at least one in twelve stars shows evidence of planetary ingestion. Planetary ingestion, or “stellar ingestion” or “stellar murder,” is when a star eats a planet. NASA predicts that in about 5 billion years, our Sun will undergo an “end-of-life transition” by ingesting a few familiar planets: Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth. The soft halo of anthropomorphization follows the description of astrophysical phenomena everywhere, such as bestowing planets with the ability to establish healthy boundaries with their parent star — “planets should never feel too comfortable as they orbit their parent star.” Do some stars have dietary restrictions? A 2019 study seems to suggests that it may just be a matter of proximity: a planet migrates into the stellar envelope and eventually becomes a meal. Is there ever a point where ingestion exceeds stellar social norms, and a star is forced to take some stellar Ozempic or a more generic brand of GLP-1? Do some stars meal prep their planetary courses? If a star eats a planet that doesn’t taste as good as desired, does the star regurgitate the planet? Unsure! But, a quick inquiry into the cosmic dietary practices tied directly to stellar lifecycles reveals that some black holes form from a dead star. One black hole shredded up, not swallowed up, a star that got too close, and according to a 2022 study, the black hole began “burping out” the energy from the shredded star two years later.
3. 🐇 🕳️ Another Rabbit Hole
Thank you for reading,
Kameelah 👽
Finally, while I do not organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this little newsletter could allow me to take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at USD 70 :)
How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL