Tootfinder

Been playing Roots Devour (#Steam via CrossOver on #macOS
BE THE ELDRITCH HORROR YOU ALWAYS KNEW YOU WERE
It's pretty great, put in 8 hours so far.
The general gist of the game is strategic, puzzle-like reveal of map levels - capturing cards of creatures and humans, wrapping them in your blood sucking vines, and generally conquering all.
When you get stuck, spend some of the blood to open a card pack and get random helper tools, effects, and critters.
Sounds are superb and visuals are very 𝒜𝐸𝒮𝒯𝐻𝐸𝒯𝐼𝒞 - if you dig Cult of the Lamb or Darkest Dungeon, you'll probably enjoy it.
Only downside is that there's an occasional indicator that English is not the primary language of the game developers. Very rarely you can see untranslated Chinese text on-screen, one or two oddities (uncapitalized, punctuation slightly off). This is unfortunately probably why they're getting a little beat up in the Steam reviews.
Honestly, in my 8 hours so far, I've noticed it like 3? 4? times tops so far. The game is so very much my jam, it really hasn't bothered me.
Some people are also reviewing it as "too linear" - they definitely gave up way too early. There are SECRETS, side areas, choices you can make, intentionally difficult areas that will take some thinking to unlock, etc.
Currently 10% off right now, give it a shot!

Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65468-7 "while EVC is permanently affected by early deprivation, categorical coding in VOTC shows resilience"; <…

Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans - Nature Communications
This study shows that transient blindness at birth leaves lasting effects on early visual functions, while higher visual regions encoding categories remain unaffected, revealing different sensitive periods for different functions in vision.

There’s an unwritten rule in publishing,
or so I’ve been told:
don’t write about COVID.
Our collective attention span has been saturated by those endless months holed up in attics and cramped corners of apartments, staring out at a world we could no longer take part in.
When the worst of it passed, we felt an urge to close that chapter, to padlock it behind a heavy latch.
But in doing so, we also tuck away the hard-won lessons of that time:
how quickly s…

Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before
H5N1 has a 50% fatality rate in humans. Yet we’re dismantling the systems designed to catch it early.

400,000 years ago, early #Neanderthals gathered around a pit in what’s now a #Suffolk forest to spark the oldest known #fire created by human hands.

The moment the earliest known man-made fire was uncovered - BBC News
Archaeologists in the UK have discovered the world's oldest evidence of humans lighting fires

Good Morning #Canada
There are several important Archeology sites in Canada that contribute to our knowledge of how the Americas evolved and the early inhabitants. One site, the Bluefish Caves located in the Yukon, was the source of decades of acrimonious debate because it directly challenged mainstream scientific thinking. Jacques Cinq-Mars, curator of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, discovered bones of extinct horses and wooly mammoths bearing marks from human butchering and toolmaking. Radiocarbon test results dated the oldest finds to around 24,000 years ago. This directly challenged established science that humans first reached the Americas some 13,000 years ago, when Asian hunters crossed a now submerged landmass known as Beringia, which joined Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age. What followed was 40 years of dismissal and derision.
This excellent award winning article by Heather Pringle covers this story.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Archeology
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/vilified-vindicated-story-jacques-cinq-mars/#:~:text=In three hollows known as,24,000 years before the present.