Be ungovernable, like birds who make nests OUT OF ANTI-BIRD SPIKES. A new study describes resourceful Dutch & Belgian corvids besting evil architecture by stealing metal anti-bird strips and using them like thorny twigs, to construct their homes.
Like thorns, the spikes may protect their nests from predators.
“NASA is hiding proof of aliens!” has to be one of the funniest takes ever.
NASA is comprised almost entirely of nerds like many of us watching Star Trek and Doctor Who and shit.
If NASA had proof of alien life they’d be throwing a massive kegger on top of the Johnson Space Center and submitting a budget to Congress for eleventy trillion dollars.
#PPOD: Pictured, behind this darker cloud, is a pileus iridescent cloud, a group of water droplets that have a uniformly similar size and so together diffract different colors of sunlight by different amounts. T Also captured were unusual cloud ripples above the pileus cloud. The formation of a rare pileus cloud capping a common cumulus cloud is an indication that the lower cloud is expanding upward and might well develop into a storm. Credit: Jiaqi Sun
I’ve fought over 350 BC coastal wildfires from 1981-93 and I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening now in our country with the current wildfire behaviour, prevalence, areas covered and consistency.
Canada is burning. #globalwarming#travel#canada#fossilfuels#science
Born in 1906, computer scientist Grace Hopper invented the first compiler for computer programming language & was among the first programmers of the Harvard Mk1 computer.
Hello #Mastodon! I am making the jump from X to here. Too many of my #science and #medicine buddies left X. If you switched from X, how do you like it here? #introductions
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.”
Born in 1906, computer scientist Grace Hopper invented the first compiler for computer programming language & was among the first programmers of the Harvard Mk1 computer.
Born in 1910, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin perfected X-ray crystallography, a type of imaging using X-rays to determine a molecule’s three-dimensional structure.
She determined the structures of insulin, penicillin & vitamin B12, leading to tremendous advances in medicine.
Evolution doesn’t look how it’s depicted in pop culture. We often picture the famous “March of Progress” illustration where a series of apes stand in line leading to a modern human.
But evolution is not linear. It branches & divides without an intended direction or endpoint through natural selection.
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.
Physicist John Tyndall is often credited w discovering the greenhouse effect, which he wrote about in 1859.
But Eunice Foote published a paper - 3yrs earlier - demonstrating how atmospheric water vapor & CO2 affected solar heating. She theorized that heat trapping gases in Earth’s atmosphere warm its climate.
A real fascinating story of how an 81-year-old former Air Force chap had come forward to announce he saw pulsars well before they were discovered but could not talk about it for half a century until the military instruments he observed them with were decommissioned and de-classified.
In a nutshell, he was using radar for a Ballistic Missile early warning system and noticed a pulsating signal showing up in his data, which was rising 4 mins earlier each day. He asked astronomers after writing down the location, and it was the Crab Pulsar!
The woman who discovered pulsars, Dame Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell - agreed with his discoveries.
Sent this to our team's slack channel overnight, and my supervisor told me he and another one of our team's astronomers were the folks that the Air Force chap got in touch with!
Shocking story about mRNA pioneer/Nobel winner Katalin Karikó, whose early advisor at Temple tried to have her deported & derailed her career because she dared to look for a better-paying job.
Later, UPenn demoted her, then forced her out, because her research wasn't bringing in enough funding. #NobelPrize#science [HT Paul Novosad]
Just found a new (to me) psychology phrase: "pluralistic ignorance". It refers to people holding one view but mistakenly assuming that the majority of others hold a different view, so they keep quiet. Very relevant for climate change action, where lots want action but think they're in the minority.
Most importantly: it stays stuck with the voltage turned off. It’s stable for MONTHS. Reverse the polarity of the electrical flow and it unsticks. YES REALLY. This is some literal “Alessandro Volta playing around with bananas in a shed” science AND YET it WORKS and we DID NOT KNOW.