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!

nature.com/articles/d41586-023…

#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.

play.acast.com/s/betwixt-the-s…

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. whyy.org/articles/lise-meitner… #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. visualcapitalist.com/cp/nature… #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. nytimes.com/2015/06/30/science… #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. npr.org/2023/08/01/1191283359/… /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.

businessinsider.com/women-manh… #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

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20…

#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. themarginalian.org/2016/04/18/… #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

Today is my dissertation proposal defense. That means I'll give a public lecture about my research in front of my committee.

As some folks may know, I'm doing another round of grad school, mid-career, focused on scientific decision making in the U.S. Congress sheril.substack.com/p/a-disser… #science #politics

In terms of PhD-ing, this is kind of like the pregame. I passed my comprehensive exams last year & will officially defend my dissertation & finish this Fall. So here goes...

A Dissertation on Democracy

Consider this the Cliffs Notes

^{Sheril Kirshenbaum (Unelected Representative)}

Latest cartoon: Quackery Quotas

The right's cries for "ideological diversity" sound fair to well-meaning people who believe in good-faith debate as a way to arrive at the truth. But truth is not the goal here; the goal is power.

#education #science #college #university #climatechange

Science is for everyone, but not everyone can see themselves there.

That’s one reason I love this beautifully illustrated, FREE to download comic book developed by Flint teachers, artists & plant biologists. Through classroom modules w real plants, high school students learn how traits evolve over time through natural selection w characters who look like more of them. And that matters toward building a more inclusive STEM future. hioh.education/monkeyflowers-g… #science #art

A significant new study, using massive biodiversity datasets, shows that invasions by non-native plants set the stage for later invasions by non-native insects.

"nonnative plant introductions are a major driver of insect invasions, and that insect invasions lag behind plant invasions. In the near future, new insect invasions are estimated to increase by 35% worldwide based on recent nonnative plant introductions."

#Biodiversity #Ecology #invasivespecies #Science

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221…

🚨 🚨 NEW JWST IMAGE 🚨 🚨

#science #space

webbtelescope.org/contents/med…

Happy birthday Rosalind Franklin!

Rosalind Franklin’s research was crucial to discovering DNA’s double helix structure. But she never received proper acknowledgement for her contribution.

James Watson & Francis Crick were awarded the credit & Nobel Prize, but their work was only possible bc they saw her unpublished data & X-ray diffraction images. nytimes.com/2023/04/25/science… #science #history #HistoryRemix

Isn’t it incredible to live on the same planet where this magnificent, ancient shark once grew up to 65 ft (20m)? 🦈

The massive megalodon swam Earth’s ocean for millions of years.

Funny how many folks mistakenly believe humans are some kind of pinnacle of #evolution. We literally just arrived a few hundred thousand years ago. #science #history

IL-6 is such a fascinating cytokine.

Here it is modulating different dendritic cell subsets
@JExpMed
#immunology #DC #cytokine #science
rupress.org/jem/article/220/10…

IL-6 selectively suppresses cDC1 specification via C/EBPβ

We show that tumor-derived IL-6 blocks the development of type 1 classical dendritic cells through the induction of C/EBPβ in the common dendritic cell progenit

^{Kim, Sunkyung (Rockefeller University Press)}

The 'There Are Such Things As Cooties' book doesn't appear to be available in UK.

I have a serious need to know as osculation, for me, has always carried great risk, #autoimmunesystem highly compromised.
The first few months of a new romantic relationship is fraught with a horrid cascade of immune response symptoms. And yet, I still do it!!! It's a really difficult one to resist.
#science #biology #immunology #immunesystem

@RhiMG Ha! There's actually a whole chapter on that in the book called, "There Are Such Things As Cooties."

The Science of Kissing is primarily a #science #book.

While we are still trying to find ways to clean up problems like oil spills in the ocean, microorganisms in the seas have their own insights to impart.

Oil rich soil from the Guaymas Basin has provided German scientists understanding of a mechanism by which archaea in the Alkanophaga break down alkane molecules and thus degrade petroleum through oxidation.

#Remediation #Bioremediation #Oil #Petroleum #Archaea #Alkanophaga #Science #Biology #Scicomm

nature.com/articles/s41564-023…

Candidatus Alkanophaga archaea from Guaymas Basin hydrothermal vent sediment oxidize petroleum alkanes - Nature Microbiology

Oil-rich deep-sea sediments are used to culture syntrophic communities of archaea and bacteria that pair petroleum alkane oxidation to sulfide generation.

^Nature

About 109 billion people have lived & died. Each grain of sand represents 10 million.

This stunning data visualization of human life by Max Roser was published in 2022.

Today there would be 805 green grains representing 8.05 billion people living on Earth. #science #art

Dr. Gladys West grew up in 1930s VA. She had limited opportunities as a black girl in the south, but went on to become a mathematician.

In the 1950s, West helped program the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator. Later, she worked on modeling the shape of the Earth & helped develop satellite geodesy models, a foundation of GPS.

West was not formally credited for her work until 2018 when the VA General Assembly honored her contributions. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys… #HistoryRemix #history #science

Science Debate is now "Science on the Ballot" with @SciPolNetwork

This nonpartisan initiative, which I cofounded in 2007, asks candidates, elected officials, the public & the media to focus on science policy issues prior to Election Day. scipolnetwork.org/science-on-t… #elections #science #politics

U.S. state coalitions are launching on Tuesday, July 18 at 7pm ET & you can join the kickoff event to get involved, learn about the program & work with campaigns. Register at ow.ly/Bgz950P20Jp

Great article in Nature on overcoming the sense of failure in research. #science

nature.com/articles/d41586-023…

"Ryan also emphasized how the students’ relationships with failure would evolve over time. “He said that the time it takes for you to recover from a failure will shorten over time, and he couldn’t be more right,” says Abebayehu."

How to train early-career scientists to weather failure

Workshops and training programmes tackle failure and how to recover from it.

^{Udesky, Laurie}

Ynes Mexia was born in 1870 & became one of the most successful botanists in the world.

At a time when most people felt women couldn't travel alone, she did - A woman of color in her 50s & 60s. Mexia traveled the Americas for 13 years, collecting >145,000 #plants & discovering >50 new species.

She was a fierce conservationist & early pioneer fighting to preserve the redwood forests of California. She also advocated for Indigenous rights. nps.gov/people/ynes-mexia.htm #HistoryRemix #science #history

I'm currently taking an evolutionary biology course so expect some fun evolution-themed content here through the summer.

The last time I took this class was in 2001 & it's exciting to recognize how much we've learned over the last 20+ years.

And I'm using your terrific book @Carl_Zimmer! (Should anyone want to check it out, it's a fantastic read carlzimmer.com/books/evolution… #science #books)