Earth-science Memes

The meme beautifully captures the collision between map projections and spatial reasoning! The original tweet claims you can sail from India to the USA in a "straight line" without touching land, showing a curved path on a flat map. But here's the mind-bender: that curved line is actually geodesically straight in 3D space! When sailing across a spherical Earth, the shortest path (a "straight line" in navigation terms) follows what's called a great circle. On flat Mercator projections, these great circles appear curved because... well, you're squishing a sphere onto a rectangle! The commenters missing this concept is pure comedy gold. It's like watching someone argue that the Earth is flat while standing on a globe!

The forgotten heroes of our ecosystem! While everyone's hugging puppies and watering plants, fungi are in the corner like "I'M LITERALLY DECOMPOSING ENTIRE FORESTS AND CREATING SOIL NETWORKS, BUT WHATEVER." These cellular superheroes form mycorrhizal networks that connect 90% of land plants, break down dead stuff, and basically run the entire underground economy of nutrients. Yet they get zero parades! No "Fungus Appreciation Day"! The mycological mafia is the true planetary powerhouse – without them we'd be knee-deep in undecomposed dinosaurs. Talk about being the backbone of evolution while getting absolutely mushROOMED out of the spotlight!