You can’t deny it — or rather, you can, but you have to ignore all the evidence. Here’s a list of seven climate hotspots where the shifts are already obvious: southern Spain, Bangladesh, Malawi, the Svalbards in Norway, Brazil, the Philippines, and so the Americans don’t wander off and wonder where those places are, New York. They’re all depressing, but I found the news about the Amazon to be most discouraging.

Perhaps most ominous is the fact that a positive feedback loop appears to be in play. As the Amazon dries, Nobre says, tropical forest will gradually shift to savanna, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and further adding to global warming.

“When we see a dry season of over four months or deforestation of more than 40 percent then there is no way back. Trees will slowly decay, and in 50 years we would see a degraded savanna. It would take 100–200 years to see a fully fledged savanna.”

The Amazon then would be unrecognizable, along with much of Earth.

We don’t know what all the global consequences of losing the Amazon rain forest would be, but apparently, we’re going to do the experiment and find out.

Meanwhile, there are still people who believe it’s not a problem, and that market forces will compensate for our new hot, dry, stormy, flooded reality. The scientific research is 97% in agreement, which is already remarkable, given how much scientists like to argue. And the other 3% is junk science.

But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)

Not so, according to a review published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3% of papers—a common way to test scientific studies—and found biased, faulty results.

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, worked with a team of researchers to look at the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last decade that denied anthropogenic global warming.

“Every single one of those analyses had an error—in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis—that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus,” Hayhoe wrote in a Facebook post.

But of course it is that flawed 3% our elected officials have chosen to accept, and we don’t have a mechanism for removing deluded idiots from office.

(via Tommy Leung, who finds the weirdest stuff)

Here’s a good one: a step-by-step recipe to becoming a fossil. Yes! I think I can do this!

Step 1 is to die. I will probably be able to do this without too much problem, but I think I’d rather wait a little while.

Step 2 is neglect. Your corpse shouldn’t be dismantled, shredded, consumed, etc. I think I can do that one, too!

So far, this is looking easy.

Step 3 is burial, also achievable. First catch, though: soil chemistry matters. This is not usually on the list of options at the mortuary. Burial under volcanic ash is mentioned as specifically a bonus, also not usually a service provided by the undertaker.

Step 4 is…fossilization? Wait a minute, all that other, easy stuff is just a prelude? Dang. And then this step looks like it’s strongly chance dependent.

Oh, well. At least the procedure doesn’t look like I’ll have to do any work, which is good, since I’ll be dead through most of it.

Fascinating — models in software games have some subtle but intentional design features. There is a game character in Overwatch (which looks like a fun game, but since it’s PC only, I’ve never tried it) named Tracer who was the focus of some controversy a while back because some of the promotional materials emphasized her lovely, shapely butt maybe a bit overmuch. Now there has been a detailed analysis of the design of her character to identify what makes her butt so nice in every view.

Wu discovered that the primary cause of Tracer’s plump backside is an inhumanly deep buttcrack. In fact Tracer has a butt crack so deep that regular humans could not possess similar physiology and survive. Such a crack would inevitably interfere with organs and the body’s structural integrity.

As a result of this bizarrely deep posterior, Tracer can be put in literally any pose, under any lighting, and her butt will still cast a shadow implying depth, plumpness and tautness. The way Tracer’s bottom is emphasised in any situation is a genuine feat of engineering.

On top of that, there’s more. Another aspect of Tracer’s butt that plays a big part in its eternal visibility is the fact that her outfit is either impossibly tight or glued to her ass cheeks.

Take a look at the image on the far right. Natural fabric would find a resting point between the peaks of the two cheeks, naturally bridging the gap. If the material pulls in to show cheek definition, this would be the result of both cheeks physically trapping the fabric. This is different, in that the fabric follows the contours of the cheeks and buttcrack without the two cheeks making contact. For the titillation of boys and girls worldwide, Tracer suffers a permanent wedgie that is literally designed to make her individual butt cheeks shine.

Wait, but what about realism? What about ethics in gaming?

We’ll get to that once I’m done marveling that there is such a thing as virtual butt analysis, and that there are game designers and artists working hard to maximize butt exposure.

Nature is also working on it. Check out Jon Snow’s butt.

They might have properties of a material that would interest an engineer, but I’m still not putting on a shirt made of fire ants.