40% Shredded Used Diapers

Shitty concrete is strong now

Researchers from a university in Japan have been messing around with a new concrete that is laced with shredded diaper waste.

Yes. Literal used diapers mixed into concrete. And they made a house out of the stuff. According to science, up to 40% of the sand used in concrete mixtures can be replaced with shredded diaper waste before integrity starts to just kinda fall apart.

The idea is to help find new uses for what is otherwise waste that isn't particularly biodegradable. Gathering up enough used diapers might be a bit of a challenge, but not because of lack of supply. Anyway, all of this to say, they made some good shitty concrete out of science, and that's rad.

Jeffrey Epstein was reportedly blackmailing Bill Gates

Essentially it goes like this: Bill Gates had an affair with a 20-something-year-old Russian bridge player. For some reason, Jeffrey Epstein learns about this relationship and then proceeds to pay for this woman's schooling. Epstein then turned around and emailed Gates being like "ayo you gotta reimburse me for her college tuition" with the implication being "…and donate to my philanthropy funds or I'll out you for your affair."

As a reminder, Jeffrey Epstein is a Very Convicted Child Sex Offender, famously known among his circle for having an island where he would take rich people and trafficked children and things would happen. Gates says it was just a big ol' whoospie-doodle that he had a relationship with Epstein.

Meta is working on a Twitter competitor because of course

Meta is reportedly working on a new platform which is seemingly aligned with the Instagram brand but has more of a Twitter vibe. The platform doesn't seem like anything super out of the ordinary, but the rumors are that Meta will have support for ActivityPub in their new platform, which is the technology that Mastodon is built on top of.

That is actually pretty interesting, as ActivityPub is an open standard for Twitter-like status posting. Not to be confused with BlueSky, which is a nascent standard built by a company funded by the former founder of Twitter and other big tech players, and is not interoperable with ActivityPub because reasons. ("reasons" being "they wanted more control over it rather than to join the existing standard").

Will this be the end of Twitter? I don't really care if I am being honest. I really think we just are past the idea of needing a replacement for Twitter. At this point, its just a lot of millennials who don't know what else to do but Post Stuff Online, and so the thought of not having a "new Twitter" is SPOOPY.

Nebraska is the latest state to arbitrarily restrict bodily autonomy

Nebraska state politicians have passed a bill which restricts Abortion after 12 weeks and restricts youth access to gender affirming care. This makes them the latest state legislature who has decided to get directly involved in some of the mostly deeply personal, medical decisions in people's lives. Because we all deeply love it when the government chooses what we can and cannot do with our own bodies.

It is expected to be signed by the governor. There are exceptions for rape, incest and life threatening pregnancy conditions for the abortion limit, but the exceptions are very limiting still. As for gender affirming care access, the bill basically spends a long time talking about how kids aren't allowed to get top/bottom surgery which, again, is not happening in any real capacity, they're just trying to evoke a visceral response to the imagery. Materially, the bill just adds more hoops, paperwork, smoke and mirrors to the process of receiving basic care for trans youth.

I do want to point out, however, that the bill—which republican state legislators voted in favor of—clearly identifies "Gender" as something other than "biological sex":

Section 16.3 of the bill reads:

Gender means the psychological, behavioral, social, and cultural aspects of being male or female

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