Text reads, 'Arrival of Homo Erectus may have triggered Mosquitoes' taste for human blood'
Mosquito-borne diseases present a significant burden on human health, with malaria alone causing an estimated 249 million cases and 608,000 deaths worldwide in 2022.
But where did their taste for humans come from?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@uom-ees.bsky.social #mosquitoes
We are looking for a four-year funded PhD student position in extreme-weather prediction using AI/ML at the University of Manchester (@officialuom.bsky.social). I am pleased to be part of the supervisory team with Prof Richard Allmendinger and Dr Michele Caprio.
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
The new University of Wyoming Radiosonde Archive web site. Shows a Mercator projection of the world with all the radiosonde locations on it. You can zoom in to a specific region for more detail. The web site reads the following: This new web page should be faster than the legacy interface and generate fewer 503 errors. One noticeable difference is that wind speeds are now reported in m/s rather than knots. This web page merges data available from the two common distribution formats. One of the output formats available are CSV files which should be easier to import into other software. The legacy interface is still available at sounding_legacy.html.
Hey meteorologists! University of Wyoming upgraded their upper-air sounding web site for more stability.
www.weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sou...
Big thanks!
A photo of an andesite - a grey rock with fractures - and then going across this, a different rock in a shade of grey too. It has banding in it from when it was intruded into the older rock. It's about 10cm wide, and halfway through, jogs to the right. Where it does this two horn-shaped bits where it was previous propagating poke off.
A photo of the three sisters of glencoe - gorgeous mountains with a moor and bracken in the foreground, and a lovely blue sky
Today in our Scotland fieldwork - we looked at pyroclastics in the Glencoe Caldera, and the lovely instrusions cutting across these. Look at how this dyke changes direction halfway through! We also had some pretty good views..
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A photo of a folded quartzite bed with my foot for scale (it's about 7 cm thick). it's white the rocks around it are darker and more variable, and inside it despite wiggling all over the place in ~20cm folds, you can see the original layering which is cross bedded
Today's fieldwork was mostly setting up things for tomorrow... But check out this folded quartzite bed in a schist. If you look closely, you can see original cross bedding within the fold! 🤩
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A photo off a rock, with some green grass below. The rock is shades of grey, white and red with green and orange lichen. One white bed (a quartzite) is split into bits, with narrow "necks" between them, and the darker rocks around it (schists) come in to fill the gap
A view down Loch Leven - a long lake with a rocky shore, blueish skies overhead and mountains in the distance
Today in the @uom-ees.bsky.social field course, our students started mapping. They met these lovely structures - boudins -in which a quartz bed was stretched and split into segments that look like a string of sausages.
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A gorgeous sunset over Loch Eil in shades of blue, purple and yellow, with draker clouds reflecting in the still water below
A view of Loch Leven from a hillside - a long narrow loch surrounded by mountains with blue skies with some cloud, and heather in the foreground
Heavily folded quartzite rock layers in white, and schists in grey. My foot for scale shows that within ~30 cm there are at least 5 folds. These rocks have been squaaaashed
A cool fold in a quartize bed - it's about 15cm thick, and contorted into a z shape
Yesterday and today have been an absolute treat in terms of both rocks and views for the @uom-ees.bsky.social geologists. The former has focussed on trying to understand large scale refolded folds, helped by obersvations small scale strucctures - such as those shown below ⚒️🧪
![A quartzite layer in a schist, which shows a refolded fold - to the left, the same bed folds over (the hinge of the fold) and then as you follow both sides of the fold towards the rright, you can see that they (and the axis [~middle] of the original fold) are folded again in a different orientation](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:c2xnz4cmi7muu7z2utawfomo/bafkreib2iuulsltnuqev36s7khvu6btttdc6phllfngmwr4ldjyidrz4gi)
A quartzite layer in a schist, which shows a refolded fold - to the left, the same bed folds over (the hinge of the fold) and then as you follow both sides of the fold towards the rright, you can see that they (and the axis [~middle] of the original fold) are folded again in a different orientation
A surface of schist exposed with lots of folds on it
Today we switched our @uom-ees.bsky.social fieldtrip to older rocks - we are now in the highlands! The students got aquainted with the Moine today, and identified at least two episodes of folding, in what were sediments deposited over 800 million years ago! 🤩
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Cross sets in a coarse yelloww sandstone with some grass on top. There are diagonal lines, ~1cm apart, in ~20 cm layers that were caused by a sediment being deposited by unidirectional flow
A dovecot and a castle in green grass under an overcast sky in St Monans, Scotland. Below both are beaches with sandstone exposures and loose rocks
A yellow sandstone church and a coastal path with a beach to the right. The beach has pebbles and outcrops of lots of beds, and the pretty village of St Monans is in the background
Day four of the @uom-ees.bsky.social field trip to Scotland saw the students doing compass and pace maps of sediments and volcanoclasic rocks at St Monans. And it saw me finding some gorgeous cross bedding. There were dovecots, castles, and churches too. 🧪⚒️
An imprint of a lycopsid trunk in a red colour with my foot for scale - the trunk is about 25 cm across, and has clear diamond shaped leaf pads in it
A photo of a grey rock bed with layers disrupted by lighter coloured verrtical structures. We think these were probably roots. There is a redder bed above, and between the rooted bed and this one is actually an erosive surface - this was probably a 320 million year old channel
Carboniferous corals - limpet for scale. This is a white rock, with long tube like structures in it. In places those have been cut across, and you can see internal plates
A hand pointing to the bottom of a yellow bed of rock (it's a sandy limestone if you are interested), which has a series of criss crossing lines on it about a cm in scale. These are old burrows
Day three of the @uom-ees.bsky.social field course, and today we had imprints of big bits of ~320 million year old tree! Roots! Corals! Amazing burrows!
~320 million years ago, this part of Scotland was cycling between marine and terrestrial environments, creating packets of repeating s
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And a second glorious day in the @uom-ees.bsky.social field trip to Scotland. Today, Carboniferous sediments in Pittenweem! Is that a lateral channel migration cutting into floodplain deposits? Some cheeky roots too.
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An image of the rock and spindle volcanic vent in St Andrews - gorgeos blue sky and a sandy beach with a bit bit of rock sticking up in the middle . Its called the rock and spindle, but this is not the only thing it looks like 😳
A view of the broader beach with green grass in the forground and blue sea in the background with the rock and spindle in the midddle, surrounded by yellowish sdeimntary rocks and sand
We had gorgeous weather yesterday for the first day of the @uom-ees.bsky.social Scotland field course. We saw igenous rocks - here is the the Rock and Spindle, St Andrews - a >300 million year old volcanic vent.
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Really excited to promote our former PhD student Shengnan Fu's work on building a county-level urban flood database by text-mining news media reports (2000–2022). @zhonghuazheng.bsky.social, Heng Lyu, Chi Zhang, @uom-ees.bsky.social
hess.copernicus.org/articles/29/...
Do giraffes struggle with food shortages in the dry season or do their long necks give them an advantage? @uom-ees.bsky.social PhD student @jgranweiler.bsky.social @susanneshultz.bsky.social joins #NEOF to sequence #giraffe faecal samples & uncover how seasonality impacts diet🦒🌿
Come and work with us!
"THE ROBERT H. AND JOANNE SIMPSON MENTORSHIP AWARD Eve Gruntfest For building a community of hundreds of social and physical scientists across the enterprise who continue to collaborate and mentor younger generations." Photo of Eve.
Congratulations to Eve Gruntfest for her Mentorship Award from @ametsoc.bsky.social.
Eve was an important influence early in my career, encouraging me and supporting me in the growing realization that meteorologists needed social scientists to help improve forecasts. A well deserved award!
#AMS2025
The SSI have announced 4 talks and a two-day workshop for social science researchers in Feb & Mar! Topics include software & practices for researchers, with a focus on early-career scientists. @uomsoss.bsky.social
Ani image of a fossil centipede (left, top right), and a modern comparison (bottom right). The fossil is a dark brown colour, and is quite fragmented - the front is towards the top, and you can see on the left, the anterior end with some legs and mouthparts, and on the right, some mean looking mouthparts. The bottom right is a better preserved, modern, mean looking set of mouthparts. Full caption from the paper: (A,B) Devonobius delta Shear & Bonamo, 1988, a pleurostigmophoran chilopod from the Middle Devonian of New York. (A) Dorsal view of head and anterior part of trunk; (B) maxillipedes. (C) Craterostigmus tasmanianus maxillipedes (cleared in Hoyer’s) for comparison with those of Devonobius delta; note absence in C. tasmanianus of ventral apodemes.
For #FossilFriday meet something of a rarity - a fossil centipede. Like last week's fossil, this is a macerate - the remains of an animal dissolved out of a rock using strong acid. The fossil, called Devonobius, is from NY state, and is around 385 million years old. Isn't it cool? 🤩
⚒️🧪🦀🦑 #evosky
ANNOUNCED: The University of Manchester and Bupa have launched an innovative new collaboration to drastically reduce the healthcare sector’s environmental impact on our planet 🌍
www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/u...
Congratulations to Professor Gary Younge, who has been named as the recipient of a prestigious Robert B. Silvers Award, in recognition of his exceptional contribution to the field of journalism 📰🎉
Read more about Professor Younge and the award below 👇
www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/m...
This has been most useful in learning to read Skew-T plots 😂
❄️ Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow ❄️
The @newscientist.bsky.social recently visited the University's Ice Cloud Chamber, in a quest to create the world's largest snowflake.
Watch the video below to see Professor Paul Connolly form snow crystals from scratch 🌨️
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ycal...
As 2024 draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on the incredible accomplishments we’ve achieved over the past year at UoM 🐝💜
Join us in revisiting some of the standout news headlines from our unforgettable year in The Review of Year 2024!
www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/t...
An image of the University of Manchester campus at sunset - lots of lovely modernist buildings with some trees, sillhouetted against a red-pink-blue sky
Hello Bluesky, from this corner of the world. From this account we'll be posting about the Earth and Environmental Sciences happening at @official-uom.bsky.social