I’ve achieved my dream collection. #PhysicalMedia

#icanhazpdf - cobb at manchester dot ac dot uk

September 17, 2024.

Alas, the existential threat that @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social & I detail in #ScienceUnderSiege grows more acute w/ each passing day of this administration: www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

"AI Will Only Intensity Climate Change. The Tech Moguls Don’t Care" | Great commentary in @thenation.com by @jricole.bsky.social: www.thenation.com/article/envi...

The temperature anomaly difference between the south and north was exceptionally large in November: it was the first occurrence when the anomaly in Sodankylä was < -2 °C and in Helsinki > +2 °C during the same month! Records kept since 1901.

'Our greatest exposure to forever chemicals comes from food - particularly fish, meat, eggs, fruit and fruit products, according to the European Food Safety Authority. ... PFAS ...[are] added to pesticides "to help them stick better to the fruit, so when it rains it doesn't wash off"'

Resource constraints (not just energy*) strike again: The hunt for copper to wire the AI boom - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

I have a new hobby, apparently: finding my book in bookshops. Here the wonderful bookstore at Frankfurt main station. 😀😀

Another two interesting studies on soil carbon sequestration, this time by Raül López i Losada and colleagues: Synergistic effects of different practice combinations: link.springer.com/article/10.1... Sequestration potential in EU arable land: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Staggering numbers of people impacted as Indonesia takes its turn in the crosshairs of climate change driven extreme weather www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

🧪

How it started vs. How it's going, #MosasaurMonday edition from Winnie! The first full scale skull prototype is ready for assembly and I can't wait to show it off, along with all of her weird facial trauma. This 86 my old Plesioplatecarpus was found just this past spring in the Niobrara of KS 🧪

How do root #microbes respond to drought? This study finds that #Streptomyces responses are strain-specific & functionally diverse, with traits & #plant effects varying independently of phylogeny, stressing the need to resolve functional traits at the strain level @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4owtjIT

Rage bait!!! @academic.oup.com How can it be 'WORD' of the year when it is two words!!!!! Grrrrrrr! 🤬 PS See what I did there?! #ragebait

Also more people-friendly - we have a streetlamp outside our bedroom window and the switch from sodium to LED has made it far more disturbing at night.

Please Demand Wildlife Friendly LED Streetlights Having a Deep Amber Tone Below 3000K www.birdsarepeople.org/letters/bird... @labourlewis.bsky.social

Agro-photovoltaic (solar panels over agricultural fields) still feels more solarpunk than real world, but they are (slowly) becoming more common, and with that, the thought about how to move towards integration with sustainable agriculture. 🧪 Link: www.cetjournal.it/index.php/ce...

Mivart seemed to believe that Darwin‘s theory entailed that if a suite of traits would be advantageous to an organism, they would necessarily evolve. This was a misunderstanding of Darwin‘s ideas. Darwin pointed out that many advantageous traits will never appear in a lineage.

How Do Periodical Cicadas Know When To Emerge? #SciComm🧪 by @grrlscientist.bsky.social #evolution #LifeHistory #PeriodicalCicadas #entomology #ecology www.forbes.com/sites/grrlsc...

This is how the inside of a female 𝗴𝗶𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗯𝗼𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸 looks like. Learn more fascinating details in this #openaccess article: 🧪 doi.org/10.1051/para...

Love Autumn, Love Winter!!! Hate 'influencers'!!! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Love papers like this: "An ACTIONABLE guide to the United Nations' Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement for research scientists" aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 🌊 🦑 🧪 #openaccess #deepseamining

Seahorses have a unique sex role reversal with male pregnancy involving the brood pouch, an evolutionarily novel organ. A study in Nature Ecology & Evolution uses single-cell genomics and in-vivo experiments to reveal the mechanisms of pouch development in seahorses. 🧪

This is not novel - it apparently happens that lots of services are run empty for various reasons www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Gavle goat is back! Pity they cut the horns out of the view & that Swedish privacy laws obvious mean pixillation of anyone in the view so it all looks a bit strange these days... www.visitgavle.se/en/gavle-goat

Here's a clip from my chat yesterday with @erictopol.bsky.social – this is about Crick's first encounter with the psychedelic poetry of Michael McClure, in 1959. For the full chat (it lasts an hour - you could just listen) go here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns2c...

Been researching this man, Hezekiah Moscow, since February 2019. He went by a nickname that was spelled a billion different ways so getting to the truth is TOUGH. Findings today for the book have blown open doors. New things after six years! AND all because of collaboration. Buy my book. Thanks 😂

9️⃣0️⃣ Yvonne Barr (1932–2016) 🇮🇪 #womeninSTEM Everyone has heard of the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), which causes mononucleosis. But did you know that the virus was discovered in 1964 by Yvonne Barr, an irish virologist, and Michael Epstein ? www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/o...

Francis Crick's biography is full of surprises as author Matthew Cobb reveals the life and work of the co-discoverer of DNA's structure, finds Michael Le Page

🧪 #resist #resistrfk #defendresearch #standupforscience Deaths from highly infectious virus are growing... as states brace for widespread outbreaks www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic...

@catieslaughts.bsky.social reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on efforts to understand how the variability of certain variable stars changes over time. 🧪🔭

The West’s vanishing porcupines www.hcn.org/articles/the... 🌐🧪

Earth cooled by 12ºC over the past 6 million years. Understanding this massive shift is key to anticipating how fast our world will heat up next. #ClimateHistory #Antarctica 🧪

Which one are you? I'm chaotic good. #books #read #write #authorlife #blueskywriters #booksky

Testing 191 proposed linguistic universals with methods that account for genealogical descent & geographical proximity: “despite vast design space of possible grammars, languages don't evolve entirely at random. Shared cognitive/communicative pressures repeatedly push towards similar solutions.“👇🧪

The ocean has a strong influence on precipitation in Southwest Asia. The historical patterns of warm and cold that suppress rain in Tehran are shown on the left. The current pattern is shown on the right, aligning closely for maximum forcing of drought. 2/3

Hear about the historic #drought going on in Tehran? Check out the thread below. Post #3 includes a link to a paper reviewing the multiple factors that force drought in the region. 🧪

That grav. lens efect is crazy James #Webb Space Telescope #JWST Vast Exploration for Nascent, Unexplored Sources TARG: #A68 2025-11-21 PI: Fujimoto, Seiji NIRCAM 444 410 356 300 277 210 200 150 115 090 yuval-harpaz.github.io/astro/jwst_l... NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/j. Roger

James #Webb Space Telescope #JWST Vast Exploration for Nascent, Unexplored Sources SCI: High-redshift Galaxies and the Distant Universe TARG: #A68 2025-11-21 PI: Fujimoto, Seiji NIRCAM 444 410 356 300 277 210 200 150 115 090 yuval-harpaz.github.io/astro/jwst_l... NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/j. Roger

Celebrating a year on Bluesky (+/-1 million, because my dates are so not calibrated), I figured I might bring back some old posts buried in the feed for #FossilFriday ⚒️🧪 There's still plenty of material from the old collection I haven't posted yet, but I have some old favorites worth revisiting!

A wave of mass brutality accompanied the vanishing of the first pan-European culture [via Science.org] 🧪🥼🦴⚔️💀🌽 "each new LBK #massacre site seems to have its own distinct character and particular details that suggest [] #brutal practices" www.science.org/content/arti... #ancient #farming #Europe

I wrote about the impact of declining insect pollinators on the global food supply. 🧪🌎

I highly recommend the biography of Francis Crick by @matthewcobb.bsky.social if you want to know more about the man behind the myth, or are just interested in the history of molecular biology 🧪 I thought I knew a little about Crick, but it turns out I didn't www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... These Russian apologists should be expelled, lose their citizenship, & sent to bloody Russia where they belong...

The USA 👎 Russia 👎 Two sides of the same bloody coin www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c6...

@peaseroland.bsky.social !