The Supreme Court found that a school acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people was such a violation of freedom of religion that they had to allow opt outs but now the 5th circuit says kids being exposed to the ten commandments isn't. The law is such a joke.

The sharia law is coming from inside the house.

photos of adult male and female Pleotomodes needhami ant-loving fireflies. The male is fairly standard looking for a firefly and mostly black with some dull red on its pronotum, while the female is wingless and cream-colored. photos by Jay Keller and Richard Joyce

we don't know what they do in there

There is so much cool stuff in Florida. People don't even know about the Ant Fireflies, the fireflies that live in anthills with the ants

Figure showing number of competitive grants mentioning women from 2015-2025. The number was rising until recently, with a precipitous drop in the last year.

At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years.

Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.”

wapo.st/4euUt1c

A wild thread:

490 million years ago, the seafloor which would become the city of Baltimore was a serpentinite-hosted hydrothermal vent complex.

Those vents laid the ultramafic structures that would, in 1812, be discovered as America's first chromite mine.

Van Gogh's The Starry Night

So yes, there's a little bit of Baltimore and a little bit of half-billion-year old hydrothermal vent in The Starry Night.

Faculty Defect From Texas Publics, Citing Censorship Fed up with the state’s censoring of Plato, Joan of Arc and Romeo and Juliet, humanities professors are leaving Texas public institutions in pursuit of academic freedom.

'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3

PS two NASA Missions to Venus, DAVINCI science.nasa.gov/mission/davi... and VERITAS science.nasa.gov/mission/veri..., are slated for cancellation under the President's and the Office of Management and Budget's 2027 NASA Budget.

A supercolony of the freshwater bryozoan Pectinatella magnifica. Each patch on the large mass is itself a colony of animals. The colonies grow on a common base (in that sense, similar to coral) which is gelatinous. Each animal (or 'zooid') has a crown of tentacles used for suspension feeding.

Three mini prints of rock drawings. The bottom one is new in my store

Rocks are memories of the land. 🩶

#art #sciart #rocks #earth #drawing

Close-up of a fractured and textured feature in positive-relief on the South Polar layered deposits on Mars.

HiPOD:A Curious Case of Positive-Relief

This observation captures a fractured feature on the South Polar layered deposits: is this an active feature? Changes in an earlier picture were hard to find due to lighting differences.

https://uahirise.org/hipod/ESP_076876_0920
#Mars #science #NASA

You'll get it but you need to watch the slide a dozen times and friends, it is worth it

Historical black-and-white botanical illustration titled "Rattlesnake Plantain, Peranium repens." It depicts a single tall flower spike with numerous small, bell-shaped blossoms arranged along the upper stem. At the base, broad, ribbed leaves with parallel veins spread outwards and lie flat on the ground. The plant grows from a central root crown, and the detailed linework emphasizes leaf texture and flower shape. The illustration is labeled as Plate XCVI from the 1899 guide "A Guide to the Wild Flowers" by F. A. Stokes.

🐍 A guide to the wild flowers..
New York, F. A. Stokes[1899].

[Source]

Five shells. Big and small. Bright and dark. Smooth and rough. Simple and not. Painted in 1696 by Adriaen Coorte, whose day is today.

Evangelicals and exvangelicals should feel the most betrayed by this. As children, we were terrorized with stories of the Antichrist. And when this emerges… silence. Not a peep from evangelical leaders.

I'm still amazed by the images we got of Orion separating from the European Service Module (ESM)

I really hope NASA was able to downlink them at a higher quality before the Service Module reentered. #Artemis

Shoutout to the Mets for this

📸 @mets.com

#FossilFriday‼️🐳 Jaw with serrated teeth of the late Eocene (~35 Mya) whale Zygorhiza kochii from southern Alabama. This is a smaller whale species than the giant Alabama state fossil, the whale Basilosaurus cetoides. UA Museums Research & Collections paleontology collection. Collector: Mark Uhen

#FossilFriday‼️🐳 Jaw with serrated teeth of the late Eocene (~35 Mya) whale Zygorhiza kochii from southern Alabama. This is a smaller whale species than the giant Alabama state fossil, the whale Basilosaurus cetoides. UA Museums Research & Collections paleontology collection. Collector: Mark Uhen

[V3cam] Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii (south Halemaʻumaʻu crater) YouTube video by USGS

Wild that there are oceans of hot murder juice trapped under our feet constantly trying to get out

[Kilauea is erupting again]

A NON MAMMALIAN SYNAPSID EMBRYO

The first non-mammalian synapsid embryo from the Triassic of South Africa

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

reconstruction by artist Sophie Vrard

The FY 2027 NASA budget request hides its science cuts by omitting mission names instead of explicitly zeroing them out.

We did the work and found 54 missions cancelled in this proposal.

This is another extinction-level event for NASA science.

Full list: planetary.org/save-nasa-science

The white flag, aka the official flag of the Confederacy

Wishing you and yours a very merry Confederate Surrender Day.

Authoritarians seek to destroy all sources of truth other than them.

The "duped voter" narrative is a comforting myth. If only we had better messaging.

The reality is tens of millions of voters looked at a platform of mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, state violence, and the dismantling of civil rights, clearly understood it, and said, "Yes, that is what I want."

Impossible to disagree with a single word that Ben Rhodes (Obama era NSC official) is saying here:

Burn it all down

The Artemis II picture I had been waiting for - the dark Moon with a bit of #earthshine on the left in front of the zodiacal light going all around: images.nasa.gov/details/art0... (this is essentially the Apollo 11 pic from 1969 - www.facebook.com/dan.fischer.... - again but with the Sun centered).

We should never be forgiven for unleashing this maniac upon the world.

It would not hurt if you called your GOP MoCs to tell them they are legally complicit with the war crimes Trump is committing.

Might not prevent armageddon, but couldn't hurt.

(202) 224-3121