What is actually mindboggling is that in USA 17% of people order take out more than once a week and 12% go to restaurants more than once a week. I guess that's the top income segment?

Happy #mothersday! The original specimen of the four-legged whale Maiacetus is a rare example of a 'pregnant' fossil. Discovered in middle Eocene rocks of Pakistan and named in 2009 with the skeleton of a near term fetus, it seemed to be presented for a head-first birth. Artwork by James Gurney.

NEW PAPER, JUST OUT! 👀 Insects from the '70s and '80s were already collecting microplastic, decades before the term microplastic even existed. 🤯 A thread on the surprising history of this pollutant and the incredible insect larvae that helped us uncover it. 🐛 Let's dive in! 🧵👇 1/x

A diva, a star #PentamerocerasMirum #paleoart #oncocerid #SciArt

Very nice animation of scientifically quite accurate Silurian oncocerid nautiloids

S.J. Hand et al. (2025) Bone microstructure supports a Mesozoic origin for a semiaquatic burrowing lifestyle in monotremes (Mammalia) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122(19): e2413569122 doi: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

My postdoc advisor, Wally Broecker, said: "Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks." Well, we are getting to the FOFO stage. 🧪 www.esa.int/Applications...

Good news in global health! In case you missed it over the weekend… Uganda declared the end of the Ebola disease outbreak, less than three months after the virus was confirmed in the capital Kampala. Read more 👉🏽 www.afro.who.int/countries/ug...

Finora la cosa migliore che ho letto sul tema Bergoglio. www.pclavoratori.it/files/index....

here's a sharper photo of the Pedilus-Meloe interaction on bugguide: bugguide.net/node/view/10..., you can see the Pedilus really going to down on those intersegmental membranes

La siccità in Germania, di marzo.

Frederick Stuart Church, ‘The Witch's Daughter’, 1881 #art #moon #owl #whitch

Today's random piece of nostalgic palaeoart: Heinrich Harder's Pteranodon! Painted for the 1916 "Tiere der Urwelt" collector card series, Harder's Pteranodon is an early and iconic depiction of this most famous of pterosaurs. The spotted wings are a bizarre choice, almost like a butterfly! (1/4)

I support trans rights; I recognise and respect trans people and their right to exist the same as others; I resent and object to the tired lies that bigots promote. Trans rights are human rights.

"Con i falsi #metalupi di #Colossal, potremmo aver visto i primissimi passi di questo scenario. Un giorno un bambino ricco potrebbe davvero ricevere un #Pikachu come animaletto da compagnia." @massimosandal.bsky.social fa riflettere demonsdancealone.substack.com/p/pikachu-ne...

if you are a cis person it costs you nothing to just say today that you see & hear your trans sisters & brothers & others over in the UK today -- and around the world, too, knowing that rulings like today's ripple out in ugly ways.

Due riflession in seguito alla storia dei metalupi di Colossal. Da un lato, i danni del tecnosoluzionismo, fomentati dal marketing che si sostituisce alla scienza. Dall'altro, un futuro forse non così improbabile di esseri artificiali. demonsdancealone.substack.com/p/pikachu-ne...

You know why European countries are so quiet about the El Salvador situation? Because they started the normalisation of extraterritorial detention of migrants and asylum seekers, often without any due process. The UK’s Rwanda plan. Italy’s attempted plan with Albania. And some still want to do it.

Every time I write something I need to relearn that 80% of my process is "muddling through."

DOGE is like Lord of the Flies—children gone amok ruining everything, understanding nothing. “For a bunch of people who are screaming about efficiency,” he said, referring to the administration’s efforts to downsize the federal government, “they’ve done the most inefficient things possible.”

This really is an extinction level event for NASA's science programs. arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

I Denisoviani rappresentano la terza umanità, oltre Sapiens e Neanderthal. Ci hanno lasciato molte tracce genetiche e pochissimi frammenti fossili, perciò ogni nuovo fossile che entra nel club è una fonte preziosa di informazioni sull'aspetto fisico, la distribuzione geografica, gli stili di vita

1. Whenever you see really vicious and widespread "spontaneous" attacks on scientific findings that challenge powerful economic interests, you can be assured that corporate lobbyists have been busy behind the scenes. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Now: NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN RELEASED FROM CECOT. As far as I'm concerned this raises the ante from concentration camp to extermination camp. That's us. Here in Trump's USA, we are sending people to extermination camps. Period. Own it.

Everyone who told me "what's the harm in hyping de-extinction technology that doesn't work" can choke on a bag of black-footed ferret dicks www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Wollemia nobilis: deep time survivor 🌲🌲🌲

Colossal Biosciences ha dichiarato di aver fatto nascere tre metalupi, animali estinti da 10.000 anni, ma la realtà è molto diversa. E l'effetto mediatico dell'annuncio ha messo in secondo piano risultati importanti per la conservazione di specie a rischio. www.lescienze.it/news/2025/04...

"Se l’approccio di #Colossal continuerà ad essere questo, allora gli eventuali “mammut del futuro” non saranno altro che elefanti indiani modificati per avere, che so io, una pelliccia piuttosto folta, o magari, per essere capaci di resistere a temperature basse." @massimosandal.bsky.social

I have devoted my life to ice age ecosystems, and I feel an acute responsibility to tell the stories of extinct species and to help people to know them better. To see this work being done with such a casual disregard not only for the truth but for life itself is genuinely abhorrent to me.

I am not necessarily against the initiative, but would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human? If you lined up a dire wolf genome with a gray wolf genome there would be millions of differences. These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf. (No paper or preprint available though).

Mi hanno intervistato su Query riguardo a questo pasticcio dei metalupi.

A graphic video shows the moment that Israeli troops fired on aid workers in clearly marked vehicles in Gaza, killing 15 people. The footage contradicts Israel’s version of events in an episode that has drawn international scrutiny. Read witness accounts: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/w...

A major paper @nature.com this week found a significant decline in dementia after an outdated Shingles vaccine. I've reviewed the study and many other relevant ones here erictopol.substack.com/p/the-shingl...

Tra l’altro, il messaggio — ripetuto alla nausea anche in Italia — è chiarissimo: la politica non può e non deve essere toccata dalla giustizia, *a prescindere* dal merito di cosa combina. È pensiero autoritario, fagocitato e spacciato per statismo democratico. E noi glielo lasciamo passare.

Why don't artists (including writers) focus on obtaining and defending social rights that would help them to live with their work, instead of this gate-keeping fetish of "hard work"? I know that jobs in art are terribly individualistic, but that didn't make the world of art more livable before AI.

New @science.org Hedonic eating (eating for pleasure, not need) is mediated by dopamine neurons (in the brain ventral segmental area, VTA) and they are antagonized by GLP-1 drugs, such as semaglutide, leading to weight loss www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

I will never understand this idea that using less work to obtain a result is somehow bad. Making things easier and faster is the point of all tech since the Paleolithic. Whatever one thinks of AI this seems a nonsense criticism to me.

Huge thanks to everyone who's bought #Dinopedia. I think it's important to remind ourselves how we got to where we are now, and telling that story was the main aim of the book. Available from @princetonupress.bsky.social ... press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #dinosaurs #books #dinosaurbooks

Beyond the clickbaity headline...a good science story on the complexities of ecology and why scientific debates over HOW we measure insect decline are important, with some comments from me 🌏🧪 #scicomm www.sciencefocus.com/comment/inse...

Giovedì 27 ore 20 ci vediamo a Le Parole Giuste - Festival del giornalismo ambientale a Roma (Industrie Fluviali in via del Porto Fluviale 35)! Si parlerà di antropocene e comunicazione ambientale in un periodo storico, geologico e politico molto difficile.

🌀 “Global Weirding” is now on the Climate Words lexicon. Read the full entry at climatewords.org/words/global-weirding We thank @katharinehayhoe.com for providing the definition 🌎

Since it's #internationalforestday, here's an example of a really old forest. Here are 145 million year old fossilized trees from New Mexico! These can be seen along the Seismosaurus trail, which is named for the dinosaur that was found nearby. #forest #tree #Fossil #newmexico #hiking #photography

Leaves from the Palaeocene Konservat-Lagerstätte Menat (France) look like they could have fallen from a tree just days ago, despite being around 60 million years old. They were preserved in the sediments of a maar lake in the volcanic complex of the Massif Central 🍃🧪 #FossilFriday #paleobotany

I’ve seen video of IDF bombing Nasser Hospital, where a friend of mine is on a humanitarian mission to treat patients. My friend survived the bombing but a teen patient he treated and who was set to go home today was murdered. Are you warmongers not tired and sick of this yet? This horror

Australian governments remain silent on massive coral bleaching right now on both sides of Australia. Instead, the Commonwealth and State governments in QLD and WA continue to expand fossil fuels - ignoring the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

More marvels. Case with a large #thylacine, a #cassowary (labelled as a Southern, but I think it's a Bennett's), and - from another case - a hoatzin (said 'what-seen' or thereabouts). How can you not be amazed by seeing things like this? Children are fascinated when they know what these animals are.

I mean, do you know what a ridiculous privilege it is to see physical specimens (ok, sadly not alive) of animals like Kakapo, Kaka, an Alpine chamois, a collection of birds-of-paradise? These should be seen as on par with paintings at The Louvre, do not ever take them off display!! #museums

Okay, paleo folks! What are your favorite MESOZOIC creatures that tend not to appear too much in popular sci-com projects? Give me dinosaurs that have never appeared in a Jurassic Park, and weird non-dinosaurs, too -- croc-line archosaurs, diapsids, mammals, amphibians, etc!