So interesting-

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

Sporophytes from moss can survive in the vacuum of space. The sporophytes were affixed to the exterior of the ISS for over nine months; 80% survived, and 89% of the surviving population was able to germinate back in the lab. buff.ly/xe85lJ2 #ShareGoodNewsToo

Icelandic uses various animal poop in insults. Examples: Sparðatíningur (lamb poop picking) = you’re nitpicking. Kríuskítur (arctic tern poop) = you’re super pale. Tittlingaskítur (small bird poop) = doesn’t matter/small fry. Taðskegglingur (horse poop beard) = you’ve such a bad/nonexistent beard.

we're getting all the downsides of cyberpunk (social alienation, ruthless hyper capitalism, digital mass surveillance state) but none of the promised upsides (cheap street food, cool jackets, super drugs that make you really fast and strong before they kill you)

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

It’s increasingly clear that social media is a net social evil which shreds attention spans, and this is why the only appropriate remedy available in this space is spending time observing Morris company wallpaper patterns

it's Christmas Eve but it's also the 16 year anniversary of the time an art historian for the Hungarian National Gallery spotted a long lost painting while watching Stuart Little with his 3-year-old daughter, recognizing it in the movie set

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

This Worm Was Chilling in a Lab for Years. Turns Out It’s a Record-Breaker gizmodo.com/this-worm-wa...

Idk if this is the quintessential Onion headline but I've thought of this at least once a week for almost a decade

Another example of what we call "hunter- gatherers" being much more: rather landscape and #biodiversity managers phys.org/news/2025-11...

It's my favorite day! It's the 38th anniversary of the Max Headroom signal broadcast intrusion! 1st incident lasted 25s during the 9PM news on WGN-TV in Chicago; The 2nd, 2hrs later, lasted ~90s on PBS affiliate WTTW during Dr. Who. You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqge...

This is an amazing fact

Autocorrect has become our worst enema.

I'm so jealous of this writer. A beautiful paragraph here.

Six species of North American bats glow under UV light, adding to growing list of fluorescent mammals www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/art...

School buses would make so much sense for V2G.. hope the technology continues to be developed.

super cool study found human artifacts in Bearded vulture nests, incl. "weaponry like a crossbow bolt and wooden lance, decorated sheep leather, and parts of a slingshot....a shoe made from twigs and grass is ~675-years-old." link to paper: doi.org/10.1002/ecy..... www.popsci.com/environment/... 🧪🌍🦉

Can confirm.. wonderful thread. We would all benefit from sniffing more trees I think.

Are there any outlets that are smart and worth reading on the right? I used to find the perspective of somebody like Noah Rothman worth listening to, but his recent appearance on the Commentary podcast, man just total intellectual bankruptcy.

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

I didn't do it, but I wish I had.

If you're looking for a timeline cleanse, you could certainly do worse than the etherial music of the neanderthals! www.openculture.com/2025/06/hear...

I gotta say I find a lot of AI discourse around higher ed very confusing. "if ChatGPT can write your essays is college even worth it?" did people think math teachers were assigning problem sets because *they* couldn't figure out the answers?

Nature is amazing

Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world, died on this day in 2017. If you don’t know the story, just read this www.theguardian.com/world/2017/s...

Imagine starting a car that hadn't run in 21 years, that's 15 billion miles away in interstellar space. That's what the NASA team just did with Voyager's thrusters. People are amazing. jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-v...

Weird rabbit holes where you learn some real like this are the epitome of good social media IMO.

"Wisconsin man" is way cooler than "Florida man"

Bat, Literally Translated into English. Map by me

so they're mycoblogging

Good to amplify these examples of good Internet amid all the trash.

The best antidote to scrolling the Internet imo

Wish we could replace the terminology "vaccine skeptic" with the more precise "credulous dingleberry" in the discourse

These are amazing, such a unique intersection of different realms

This is a fun thread, social media can be good:)

every day, otters wake up and make this world a better place

Cars used to come in colors.

Best Photo bomb 😍

Here are my book recommendations for the new year: Read the books you already bought.

I told a new acquaintance this week that sharks are older than trees and I need to update my weird paleo facts because this version utterly rules

Ethiopian wolves look like wolves cosplaying as foxes and roam the high mountains on either side of the Great Rift Valley. There are fewer than 500 adults left, rendering the species the rarest canid in the world.

For me, the most incredible artefacts from the ancient world are the letters people wrote on clay tablets and sent to one another over thousands of years in Mesopotamia, going back to more than 5,000 years ago. They contain recognisable humanity, warmth and humour. Here's a thread of my favourites.

There’s only one surviving document signed by the first four US presidents (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison) and it’s a 1793 subscription list, now at the American Philosophical Society, raising funds for André Michaux’s botanical expedition—remarkable proof of early US support of science

About me: I'm a scientist and educator. I'm fascinated by our natural world and interested in how we best serve students in such rapidly evolving times. I'm also interested in crafts like woodworking and homebrew. I follow politics, perhaps too much. I don't post that much.

I wish everyone who talked about how hard it is to make high speed rail profitable also talked about how hard it is to make interstate highways profitable.

Finding out that Lake Superior "Never gives up its dead" because it's so cold that the colonies of bacteria that decompose corpses can't survive in it so those bodies never fill up with gas and surface, all because I looked up the lyrics of a 1976 folk song, is what the internet should be more like.

@shoe.bsky.social are you the account that was onesoleshoe or some such in the before times on twitter?

Let's talk about barreleye fishes in family Opisthoproctidae. Take a minute to take in the image below. What look like 'eyes' above the tiny toothless mouth are in fact chemosensory organs equivalent to nostrils. The EYES are the green domes INSIDE THE TRANSPARENT HEAD. And they look *up*...