Alan Turing was a mathematician & cryptographer who was a leading code-breaker in the team that decrypted Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine during WWII. He inspired modern computing & what became AI.

Instead of being hailed as a genius & hero, Turing was convicted as a homosexual & forced to endure chemical castration. He died by suicide at 41 in 1954.

The British government didn’t apologize until 2009 & Queen Elizabeth II finally pardoned him in 2013. #history #science

In 1916, 23 yr old chemist Alice Ball discovered a breakthrough in treatment for Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease). She was the 1st woman & 1st Black chemistry professor at UHawaii.

Tragically, Ball passed away months after her discovery due to complications from a lab accident.

What happened next? Arthur Dean, head of her dept, continued the work publishing Ball’s process as “Dean’s method.”

Fortunately, a colleague spoke up & the name was changed to “Ball’s method.” #HistoryRemix #science #history

This excellent illustration, “The hostile obstacle course that #women & BIPOC have to endure in academia” is making the rounds again & it’s always worth resharing.

Also, this applies to far, far more than careers in #science. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00868-0

If you are drafting figures for a scientific paper or presentation, remember that https://scidraw.io/ exists: a repository of free SVG cartoons for science.

#SciDraw is supported by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre.

All content on SciDraw is shared under creative commons license (CC-BY) unless stated otherwise.

#inkscape #SVG #science

Thanks for this.

It's impossible to keep up with the rate of progress in the Sciences (as with the rest of society) nowadays. Judging by video this is a southern hemisphere location and so it turns out - Namibia. But if I'd heard of this project in 2004 - I'd long forgotten it. Fascinating.

#Astronomy #Science #Universe #Cosmos
#GammaRays #HESS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Energy_Stereoscopic_System

gamma Ray Telescope System in Namibia

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Katherine Esau, born in 1898 in Ukraine, was a pioneering botanist who studied plant anatomy & viruses.

Esau began studying agriculture in 1916 in Moscow. Her family fled to Berlin & ultimately arrived in the US in 1922.

Esau earned a PhD & her research on plant structure spanned 7 decades. She wrote 6 textbooks & was the 6th woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1989, Esau received the National Medal of Science. https://ccber.ucsb.edu/ucsb-natural-history-collections-library-and-historical-information-katherine-esau/life-katherine #HistoryRemix #science #history

Scientists in China have found evidence that our ancestors were almost entirely wiped out ~1 million years ago.

Why? #ClimateChange

While not every expert agrees, the research is intriguing & @Carl_Zimmer has the details: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/science/human-survival-bottleneck.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare #science

Globally we produce A LOT of #energy, but did you know the majority of fossil energy gets wasted? In the US alone, two-thirds of that energy is *wasted* as heat.

As Hannah Ritchie has pointed out, we don’t actually need to produce a low carbon equivalent of all of the coal, oil & gas we currently use.

That means we can decarbonize quickly by being less wasteful & more efficient. #ClimateChange #science

Various turtle shell patterns.
By #AnimalPhotography

#NaturePhotography #Plant #Plants #Flower #Flowers #Photography #Photographer #Video #Science

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek died #OTD in 1723.

A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as "the Father of Microbiology", and one of the first microscopists and microbiologists. Van Leeuwenhoek is best known for his pioneering work in microscopy and for his contributions toward the establishment of microbiology as a scientific discipline. via @wikipedia

Books by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8336

#books #science #microbiology

About 250M years ago, 90% of species on Earth died during the Permian extinction.

Tragic? Perhaps. But it also created a lot of vacant niches to fill.

And not long after, the very first mammals, our ancestors, appeared.

#Life on Earth is resilient & will continue to be, whether we're part of it or not. #history #science

Born in 1861, Nettie Stevens received her PhD in 1903. She went on to discover sex chromosomes in mealworms. Until then, it was believed that the mother or environment determined males & females.

But... Edmund Beecher Wilson published first. He may have seen Stevens' results & also didn't quite get everything right.

Stevens' work had the correct conclusion, but Wilson is most often credited with this discovery.
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12105830/nettie-stevens-genetics-gender-sex-chromosomes #HistoryRemix #history #science

“Shedding the hectic energy #Twitter had conditioned me to was an adjustment, but it definitely made life better. And watching the vandalism wreaking havoc on the place formerly known as Twitter makes building so very satisfying. #Science #Mastodon doesn’t even need to grow to be great. But it sure looks like it’s going to.”

https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/08/20/how-is-science-twitters-mastodon-migration-panning-out/ via @jby

How Is Science Twitter's "Mastodon Migration" Panning Out? - Absolutely Maybe

“Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty.” And Mastodon was the most common destination if they opened…

^{Hilda Bastian (Absolutely Maybe)}

“Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst & uncertainty.”

That survey with only a 5% response rate went viral & got me wondering about other evidence & how the #ScienceTwitter #MastodonMigration was panning out.

So I updated my study tracker & wrote a new post @PLOS : https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/08/20/how-is-science-twitters-mastodon-migration-panning-out/

tl;dr There's been a big recent surge here; the future of #ScienceMastodon looks bright; ScienceX is materially diminished tho the network is still there.

#Science #SciComm

How Is Science Twitter's "Mastodon Migration" Panning Out? - Absolutely Maybe

“Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty.” And Mastodon was the most common destination if they opened…

^{Hilda Bastian (Absolutely Maybe)}

I adore this comic by @elisegravel.

“So, yeah, YOU can be a scientist, too!” #science #art #education

As scientists pull back on, or drop entirely, their Twitter presence, a lot of them are coming here.

Welcome them, follow them!

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02554-0

#science @scientists

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty

A Nature survey reveals scientists’ reasons for leaving the social-media platform now known as X, and what they are doing to build and maintain a sense of community.

^{Vidal Valero, Myriam}

Something weird's going on with the Google Scholar index. I just went looking for Janzen (1980) and got ... a paper in Ecological Economics as the top result? And when I forced it to find the canonical paper, it only gave me citations to it?

Did @sse_evolution's move to OUP somehow break the journal's representation in Google Scholar?

#evolution #science

I haven’t been sharing interviews here, but it was an absolute delight to join Kate Lister on #BeTwixtTheSheets to talk about the #history & #science of kissing.

Yes, I’m a scientist focused on policy, sustainability & communication, but 12 years ago, I wrote a book called The Science of Kissing. We contain multitudes.

https://play.acast.com/s/betwixt-the-sheets/history-of-kissing-why-do-we-lock-lips

History of Kissing: Why do we lock lips? | Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society on Acast

A good old smooch. It’s something that we do on a daily basis in one form or another (if we’re lucky), and yet have you ever stopped and wondered why we do it? Wonder no more.

^acast

Physicist Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry without her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.

Albert Einstein called Meitner “our Marie Curie." She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII. https://whyy.org/articles/lise-meitner-the-forgotten-woman-of-nuclear-physics-who-deserved-a-nobel-prize/ #science #history

Explore ~14 billion years of time in this fascinating graphical summary of events from the Big Bang to the present day by talented artist Pablo Carlos Budassi.

Beginning at center of the spiral, every billion years is represented by a 90-degree stretch, with the exception of the last 500 million years represented as the last 90-degree stretch for greater detail. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/nature-timespiral-the-evolution-of-earth-from-the-big-bang/ #art #science

NYT’s opinion writer Paul Krugman is declaring #climate is now a culture war issue 🤔

I worked in the U.S. Senate ~20 years ago. Covered climate as a journalist. Cofounded an NGO focused on science policy issues during elections. Am finishing a dissertation on how Congress has made decisions about #science policy for the last 1/2 century - with climate as a central theme.

This isn’t new. #ClimateChange has *always* been a culture war issue.

Did you know the most abundant vertebrate on Earth often starts life as a male & transitions to female?

Scientists estimate the number of bristlemouth fish range from hundreds of trillions to quadrillions(!) of individuals. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/science/bristlemouth-ocean-deep-sea-cyclothone.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare #science #nature

Update: The family of Henrietta Lacks has reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, a #science & technology company that used & profited from cells taken without her consent in the 1950s.

The announcement came yesterday on what would have been Henrietta Lack’s 103th birthday. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/01/1191283359/henrietta-lacks-descendants-settlement-stolen-cells /2

"Christopher Nolan's #Oppenheimer explores the work of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer & colleagues to create the atomic bomb.

Yet, the film fails to depict a key part of the story, using 2 female scientists as stand-ins for ALL of the women who contributed."

Hundreds of women were essential to the Manhattan Project, including Nobel Prize winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer. But they are largely absent in the #film.

https://www.businessinsider.com/women-manhattan-project-christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-completely-ignored-2023-7 #HistoryRemix #science #history

The women that Nolan's new film 'Oppenheimer' completely ignored

Women serving in key roles like explosion techs, librarians, and hematologists were essential to the Manhattan Project.

^{Katie Hawkinson (Insider)}

Preprint from Salzberg team questioning a 2020 Nature paper from Rob Knight 😮

"the raw read counts were vastly over-estimated for nearly every bacterial species, often by a factor of 1000 or more."

"Our conclusion after re-analysis is that the near-perfect association between microbes and cancer types reported in the study is, simply put, a fiction."

Major data analysis errors invalidate cancer microbiome findings

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.28.550993v1

#microbiome #genomics #research #science

Major data analysis errors invalidate cancer microbiome findings

We re-analyzed the data from a recent large-scale study that reported strong correlations between microbial organisms and 33 different cancer types, and that created machine learning predictors with near-perfect accuracy at distinguishing among cance…

^bioRxiv

Born in 1928, Vera Rubin set her sights on Princeton, but they wouldn’t accept female grad students in astronomy. So she earned her master’s from Cornell & PhD from Georgetown.

In 1965, Rubin became the 1st woman allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory. She went on to find evidence for the existence of dark matter.

In 1993, Rubin was awarded the National Medal of Science. But curiously, she was not awarded a Nobel Prize. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/18/vera-rubin-interview-women-in-science/ #HistoryRemix #science #space #history

Hi again #Mastodon!
I joined the fediverse when a lot of my community had not migrated from the bird site, so could only partially reconstruct it here using automated tools. If I followed you there and don’t here, say hi and let’s reconnect!

For those who don’t know me, I am a #virologist by training with almost 20 years of experience as a #science #editor, a passion for #microbiology and all science really, #OpenScience #openaccess & people

Have a lovely day everyone

#introduction #fediverse