A starfield filled with thousands of stars and shining clouds of dust. The Milky Way\u2019s elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Spanning more than 100,000 light-years, Earth is located along one of the galaxy\u2019s spiral arms, about halfway from the center. Credit: NASA

OH. MY. GOD.

THIS IS THE MILKY WAY SHOT BY THE ARTEMIS II CREW. LOOK AT ALL THOSE STARS!!!!

A screen shot from one of the Thor films (Thor: Ragnarok), with a dark haired pale skinned woman wearing dark eye makeup and clothing (Cate Blanchett playing Hela, Thor's elder sister) holding her arm straight out, braced against Thor's hammer that has been thrown at her. The scene is over a green field under a cloudy gray sky. The hammer is labeled "It's basic biology". She is labeled "Advanced Biology".

Reposting this meme (with alt text) as a stand alone for any future usage needs where someone might prefer it not being already part of a thread:

Help me raise money for cancer research On July 5th I'll jump into the water in Rotterdam to swim 3 km to collect money for cancer research. I'm collecting money for this research since I've had multiple people in my family fight against c...

Link: www.rotterdamcityswim.nl/fundraisers/...

A screenshot of a map of Rotterdam. A blue line circles the maritime district. The blue line represents a 3 km route

I already posted this to several social media platforms, but: I signed up for the swim to fight cancer event in Rotterdam on July 5th! I'll be swimming the attached 3 km route.
This event also comes with a fundraiser.
If you want please donate, link is below!

It takes 5 seconds to double check you use the right name. Could I have responded more graciously? Sure maybe, but I'm done with trying to bend myself over backward to accommodate even potential bigots

So I responded quite sharply telling them to do their research prior to reaching out. I'm sorry but if you don't have the respect to use someone's actual name or refer to them as the gender they live as, then you don't deserve a friendly tone back in an email

FURTHER, this person referenced a paper which I published with my true name! So I replied to this email quite sharply telling them to do some research first before reaching out to me or other transgender researchers

Now this surprised me enormously since I use my current and true name to publish all but one of my papers, all of the databases (ORCID + Elsevier, etc.) are up to date and if you search my name you have to dig relatively deep to find my dead name.

Email from sales representative from liquid instruments trying to set up an online meeting. His name and my deadname are redacted

This morning is the first time in 5+ years that I got deadnamed by someone outside of my family. Even worse, this was a sales representative for a company...

The minute DEI got targeted and we continued to do nothing ?

The whole country was lost.

And until we actually name that

It will stay lost

4 Black journalists have been kidnapped by the federal government

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

MDPI published over 18000 special issues in 2023. That’s insane.

This is in fact me sober

You're told it'll sabotage your career if you're a vocally politically opinionated, queer, woman. But things sabotaging my career are systemic xenophobia, sexism, and horrible job market. Which are a direct consequences of people not being vocally opinionated in the first place.

-Always loved nature, but terrified of bugs
-had to do an internship on mites at a biocontrol company during my BSc.
-fell in love with their behaviour
-met a researcher from an ecological institute working on hyperparasitoids and honeydew
-fell in love with that study & dedicated my career to it

All in all, this is the first paper looking at the effects of aging in aphid honeydew on not only the bacterial community but also the volatile community. To me this also raises the question if the hoverfly eggs would also have a higher emergence rate on these ages of honeydew.

Interestingly, the high presence of alcohols and ketones were not as interesting for the oviposition of E. balteatus, mostly preferring either fresh honeydew or 72 hour aged honeydew.

Further, we found that the volatilome of 24 hour aged A. fabae honeydew was dominated by Alcohols and Ketones, but after 24 hours no volatile class dominated the volatilome anymore. Likely indicating changing metabolism in the bacterial community.

As both honeydews aged, the relative abundance of these bacteria decreased, but the relative abundance of Acetic acid bacteria (i.e. Acinetobacter) and commensal bacteria (i.e. Staphylococcus) increased. Likely indicating that the aphid inhabiting microbes need the aphid environment to survive.

Interestingly, we found that the early community harbored a higher concentration of obligate endosymbionts such as Buchnera and gut-associated bacteria such as Erwinia.

We found that A. fabae honeydew harbored a more diverse bacterial community than A. pisum and also excreted a higher dose of volatiles than A. pisum honeydew.

We collected honeydew of both the black bean aphid (Aphis fabae) and the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum). Afterwards we let the honeydew age in open air for up to 72 hours. We sampled both the volatilome, bacterial community & oviposition preference of Episyrphus balteatus every 24 hours.

Bacterial Communities in Aphid Honeydew Provide Species-Specific Functional Chemical Cues in Aphid-Predator Interactions - Journal of Chemical Ecology The role of microbial communities in aphid honeydew in shaping multitrophic interactions remains uncertain, while bacterial diversity and its variation among aphid species and ageing are still underex...

I'm delighted to say that the paper I collaborated on with Gembloux Agro-Biotech last year, finally got published online today in Journal of Chemical Ecology! doi.org/10.1007/s108...
#newpaperalert
#honeydew
#entomology

Basic light pollution diagram showing four different streetlight set ups ranging from more light pollution on the left to less light pollution on the right. The most pollution option, labelled "very bad" is a street lamp with a round uncovered bulb on top, making a sphere of light in the air. The next option, labelled "bad" has a tiny cap on top, that limits the upward pollution a bit. The "better" option is mostly uncovered on top, limiting pollution above the streetlight. The final option, labelled "best" has a full shroud overtop, limiting the light to only below the streetlight, where it is needed for pedestrians and vehicles.

Lots of folks captioning aurora photos like "for a few minutes we didn't think about politics"

guess I'm built different, every time I'm out trying to see night sky stuff I frequently think about how much light pollution is entirely preventable with just a tiny bit of regulation

So like, if you're from Bremen and can help, please DM me 🥹

I'm sorry, I just want to know. Why is it so fuckn difficult to rent a fucking apartment in Bremen?
Either they won't rent it to me because my German is not "good enough", or they require me to go to Bremen in person to view one (1) apartment.
Please, I just don't want to be homeless for my postdoc

Veel gevestigde media zijn gewoon keihard deel van het probleem, laten we dat gewoon hardop zeggen, ook ik, juíst ik als journalist. Een extreem-rechtse demo is per definitie gewelddadig. Ga gvd eindelijk eens je journalistieke verantwoordelijkheid nemen.

We could be 5 to 10 years from toothpaste that can regrow tooth enamel.

The scales are beginning to tip in favor of Mars once sustaining life. We’ll potentially know for sure by 2040.

The blue macaw is up to 160 individuals from an all-time low of 7, and confirmed to be breeding in the wild.

none of the gotcha examples of "out-of-control scientific spending" bother me in the slightest. isn't science about finding shit out? "they spent a million dollars of taxpayer money to see if they could make mice sexier" okay, well, what was the answer? I want to know too