Recruiting a postdoc to work on ocean bubbles and gas exchange stuff for the next three years in London. If you know of anyone who might be interested, please pass on the job advert here:
And if you know of someone who might like to work as a paid research assistant just for the duration of the cruise (no previous experience of gas exchange studies necessary, just PhD level experience of physical science data collection), do reply here.
You gotta understand that professional titles are vital to state for minoritised groups. Basically an ethnic minority woman feels she needs to state her title and/or qualifications to be taken as seriously as a white man. It’s not showing off. It’s a necessity for doing the work. #science #academia
A new study at King's College, Cambridge reveals the striking benefits of letting lawns go wild. But can others be persuaded to break with a 300-year old social norm?
#Introduction
I was never on twitter, but I figured I'd try out Mastodon. I'm a chemist and chemical biologist by training and my work comes home a bit too often as an amateur baker. I've done bike commuting in worse climates with better infrastructure (Fort Collins, CO and PDX) and better climates with much worse infrastructure (Orange County, CA). Anti-car, pro-community. #Science#Chemistry#ChemicalBiology#Baking#Biking#BikeCommuting
If I published on Substack somewhere a post with the title, "Guest Essay Arguing that the New York Times Opinion Section is Close Minded Has Been Rejected by — You Guessed it — the New York Times!" the eye rolls in the Times office would be immediate, and if the smirking, eye-rolling editor even gave a thought to it, that first thought would be: "the great majority of essays submitted blind to the Times opinion section are rejected. There's no irony here— and no surprise."
While satellite-based global navigation systems have become essential tools in our daily lives, their effectiveness is often hampered by the fact that the signals cannot be accessed in underground, indoor, or underwater environments. Recently, a novel navigation system has been invented to address this issue by utilizing the...
Can you trap a galaxy in a crystal ball? I tried! Back in 2018 I took this image of the Milky Way through a crystal ball from ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile.
If you look carefully you can even recognise some constellations. Due to the way the ball projects the image, the constellations in the background and within the ball are symmetric relative to the center of the ball.
@obtener Because an eclipse is fun and not damaging and we like to think about it, and climate change is not fun and very damaging and we don’t like to think about it.
It's high time we redefined "exploration:". It should NOT be about being big - drawing a map of something named after your sponsor, planting a flag, being "first". It should be about being small: sitting inside a system/place and learning how it works with humility, looking at the way it does things, not at what we see most easily or want to see. A map is not the end goal of exploration. It's just the tool that tells you where the starting point could be.
Plants are surrounded by a fine mist of airborne compounds that they use for communication and protection. A team of Japanese researchers has deployed real-time imaging techniques to reveal how plants receive and respond to these aerial alarms. Science Alert has more, including footage showing a plant “talking” to its neighbor. https://flip.it/lAl00b #Science#Plants#Biology#Botany
📣 My nature documentary "Antarctica Unearthed", which I shot entirely solo during my recent expedition to Antarctica, is exciting and a huge undertaking.
“I’m not innocent, I broke the law and deserve to pay for my crime. However, I’m still a human. They even have warnings on the radio ... but we sit here and fry.”
For this story, Michelle Pitcher created an interactive map of #Texas prisons, with a marker for whether each one has full air conditioning, partial #climate control, or no AC at all.
When is someone going to put a stop to this? I’m looking at YOU, Federal Government. If you could use troops to integrate a school back in the 1950’s you sure as hell can use them to force humane conditions for prisoners in the barbarian Fascist state of TX. It is still part of the Union and ultimately under Federal jurisdiction. Or are these now the Untied States?
A new drug developed by QIMR Berghofer could transform the treatment of COVID-19 by potentially protecting against infection by any SARS-CoV-2 variant and reversing the persistent inflammation that is a major driver of debilitating long COVID.
Scientists have detected a new carbon compound, methyl cation, in space for the first time using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. This compound, crucial in forming complex carbon-based molecules, was found in a young star system in the Orion Nebula. The discovery could enhance our understanding of life's potential development...
Some of you might be interested in the new magazine, BrainFood, focused on interesting/educative videos that generate (scientific) wonder, curiosity, and/or understanding....
This is how technology changes our view of reality.
The enormous LSST camera (the eye of the Rubin Observatory) will will soon start scanning the entire visible universe every 3-4 days. It will create the grandest movies ever made, watching for anything moving, flickering , appearing, or vanishing in deep space.
Scientists have to reset their superlatives. A quasar known as J0529-4351 is the most luminous single object in the known universe, emitting as much energy as 500 trillion suns.
It's powered by a supermassive black hole that swallows 300,000 Earth masses of gas every day.
Actress Hedy Lamarr (nee Hedwig) and composer George Antheil received US patent for their "Secret Communications System", an early version of frequency hopping using a piano-roll to switch among 88 frequencies to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. The U.S. Navy rejected the idea, then seized it as "alien property" in 1942 (Lamarr was Austrian) but filed it away with no record of a working device being produced. via @wikipedia
This paper describes the predatory bacterium Vampirococcus lugosii, which preys on members of the bacterial species of the genus Halochromatium [1].
This thing is incredible. For example: Vampirococcus lugosii has a severely reduced genome, something like 1.3 Mbp, and lacks the genes which code for many of the standard biosynthetic metabolic pathways (e.g. phospholipid synthesis, amino acid synthesis, and nucleotide synthesis). Yet it is somehow still alive.
How does this work?
One mechanism that Vampirococcus uses is to get these raw materials from its prey. An example of this are the nucleotides that Vampirococcus lugosii gets by chopping up the DNA that it sucks out of its prey. And amazingly, Vampirococcus lugosii uses a CRISPR-Cas system and various restriction enzymes to accomplish this. See the image for a cartoon of this system.
Predatory microbes.
Crazy.
Description of “Candidatus Vampirococcus lugosii”]
Lugosii after Bela Lugosi (1882–1956), who played the role of the vampire in the iconic 1931’s film “Dracula”. Epibiotic bacterium that preys on anoxygenic photosynthetic gammaproteobacterial species of the genus Halochromatium. Non-flagellated, small flat rounded cells (500–600 nm diameter and 200–250 nm height) that form piles of up to 10 cells attached to the surface of the host. Gram-positive cell wall structure. Complete genome sequence, GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession number PRJNA678638.
@dmm Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen coined (in their book “Figments of Reality”) the principle of “Murphic Resonance”: If something is possible at all (and advantageous), then #evolution will come up with a way to do it.
Biology, especially of small organisms, is full of it!
@dmm Really interesting, because I didn't really have a good example of a parasitic habit in Prokaryota without going straight for viruses, which it's debatable if we can consider alive-alive. I really like how this confirms that parasitism can exist in all scales of cellular organisms from the unicellular to the pluricellular.
@clarissadelune@mekkaokereke
This is one of those news items that really shouldn’t be news in an equal society but really is news in ours.
Parallel Universe Headlines:
• Study suggests some men still think women haven’t always been awesome!
• Study finds confirmation bias data hole as men only looked for evidence of their greatness!
• Turns out that awesome women were always awesome! 🤷🏼♀️
Well done everyone on the study. The more we shake out the crap the better.
