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.
@Sheril@elisegravel Very cool. Also, scientists will never tell you "This [whatever] is absolute truth" but rather "From what we know thus far..." such and such. Science is in continuous evolution the same way we never stop learning (if we try). No wonder fanatics hate it.
Women in the History of Science brings together primary sources that highlight women’s involvement in scientific knowledge production around the world. Drawing on texts, images and objects, each primary source is accompanied by an explanatory text, questions to prompt discussion, and a bibliography to aid further research....
The UK bungled covid response just like the US did, and the NHS is under attack by people trying to wreck it so it can be privatized-- so you're not far behind us. There will always be people nervous about vaccines, but the problem gets magnified when healthcare institutions aren't trustworthy.
@violetmadder@cmsdengl@iamcanehdian our problems with antivaxxers started long before covid. We have struggled with MMR uptake since at least Andrew Wakefield.
#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
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.
You can see more of photographer Ole Bielfeldt's remarkable work -- including a video of a struck match -- on his Instagram feed. https://www.instagram.com/macrofying/
@SKV@Sheril
This is not correct. The Earth has been known to be round since Classical times, and this has always been accepted by mainstream Christianity.
@SKV@Sheril
No need to apologise, it is a very common misconception. It is used by Flat Earthers to erroneously claim that the Catholic Church once supported Flat Earth.
@wjmaggos@dangillmor What I've done is go to: https://fediscience.org/public/local and also https://fediscience.org/public and just looked at who's posting, find interesting people, and follow them. I wasn't able to access an instance Directory (some instances allow this), but this is working for me so far! I just check in periodically, and then I try to remember to put them all on my science list.
@simon_brooke None that I know of, unfortunately. (I currently run @SNEWS and @HyperKamiokande manually; but for SNEWS at least, I should look into writing a bot to share real-time alerts …)
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.”
@Sheril I want to know more about this "lab accident" given that Dean subsequently grabbed credit for her work. If only Hercule Poirot had been available to investigate. 😉
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.
@Sheril@lisamelton out of respect for this absolute legend, I shall nobly resist the urge to make any rear admiral jokes.
There should be statues of Grace Hopper in every major city, her life should be the subject of textbooks and movies. She was a total bad ass, perhaps one of the most important people to ever live.
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.
@Sheril Meitner's Nobel snub was terrible on so many levels.
For everyone who doesn't pay attention to the periodic table, she did get an element named after her (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitnerium), though only after her death.
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]
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.
Sadly I think skin will be a fairly poor use; you’d have to go down multiple dermal layers before getting to tissue that I think might work, and even then, you’d be dealing with new layers of skin growing out and old layers being pushed off and dying.
American physicist and chemist Katharine Burr Blodgett was born #OTD in 1898.
She was the inventor of a technique for making non-reflecting "invisible" glass, a material used in virtually all camera lenses & many other optical devices. She was also responsible for developing an instrument that can measure film thicknesses to within a few angstroms. She did research on methods of removing ice from airplane wings. She is also credited with the development of a new type of smoke screen.
@gutenberg_org to me she’s familiar from the Langmuir-Blodgett trough, which was not mentioned. Frankly I’m surprised I remembered this stuff from my nanotechnology days
Austrian actress & inventor Hedy Lamarr died #OTD in 2000.
Most of her inventions were not widely used, but in the 1940s she wanted to create something that would help Allied forces fight the Nazis as part of the II WW. She worked with composer George Antheil to develop a new way to steer torpedoes. She had already discovered that radio-signals used to control torpedoes could be jammed by the Nazis, making them miss their targets, & wanted to come up with an unjammable alternative.
The pair settled on a system that would randomly switch to different radio frequencies to get around jamming, known as frequency-hopping (FH) spread spectrum communication. It was controlled by a piano player mechanism of Antheil’s, meaning the system could switch between one of 88 different frequencies for each of the 88 black and white keys on a piano.
It is often said that this patent means Lamarr helped to invent Wi-Fi, but the story is more complicated than that. Lamarr and Antheil patented their invention in 1942, but it was classified until 1981, and during that time only used in military technology such as sonar or satellite communications. via @newscientist
