Sol 1917: Left Mastcam-Z Camera, acquired at 12:01:40.098 (local mean solar time), image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

You have until midnight tonight (Monday). Please be coherent and cogent but leave a message!

Jurassic Park and bonkers stuff like Event Horizon or Until the End of the World all had prime Sam Neill moments. My favorite are in this unpretentious comedy though:

#caturday This is our other cat Penny. She is more aloof and judgmental than π. Her favorite thing besides food is jumping into this basket so she can be vigorously petted while getting soothingly scruffed on all sides by the wicker.

The endeavor to rescue NASA’s Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind.

Surely healthy projections.

So spectroscopy is how chemists & physicists “see” molecules and materials we can’t see with our eyes.

Olympus Mons - ESA Mars Express - From Andrea Luck (andrealuck.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/2op8YaG

I’m excited to announce the UVA Center for Smell and Taste Disorders will be leading (in partnership w/ JHU and MUSC) a new NIH-supported clinical trial to investigate the ability of olfactory training to restore post-viral smell loss (anosmia). Enrollment begins later this year; details to come.

The quality of air quality data is improving. This is a reasonable map of the LA area showing hazardous air around Riverside. We have enough density, now it would be good to have NOx and other species measured.

I use semicolons a lot; LLMs seem to use them rarely. No deeper point, it's just something I hadn't thought about until reading this post:

I spoke to @ldattaro.bsky.social for Chemical & Engineering News about how the Slaughter decision is consistent with ongoing efforts to presidentialize federal science agencies under Trump II. cen.acs.org/policy/supre...

Latest UKHSA/NHS/ONS data show COVID continues to persist in England. This virus hasn’t gone away — and Long COVID research should stay front and centre. It mostly appears to spread through the air indoors. Clean indoor air could help to protect us. Data: @ukhsa.bsky.social #CleanAir #PublicHealth

This is π , my wife's covid cat. She is the most vocal cat I've ever known. Imagine R2D2 but in trills and meows. There's rarely any doubt what she's thinking.

Familiar seascape. When I was a kid in Florida the newspaper would have a black and white, worse quality than this image of the Carribean, sometimes on the front page. I'd cut them out to do hurricane tracking.

Apple Tahoe managed to crack that proprietary Microsoft technology where you have to be within one pixel of the right location to resize a window. 🙄

For most fireworks shows, there is a temporary spike in particulate matter in the air. If you grill, that's a much bigger dose of particles, some of them potentially carcinogenic.

Amazed at how sticky google search is. I stopped using it a decade ago simply because it wasn't the best anymore, and it evidently has gotten much worse since. I'm not anti-google: docs, drive, scholar, patents and maps have been useful, but their web search is awful at this point.

Something I was asked a few times, and I think merits a bit of detail for people not in the research industry, is what goes into the pricing of an analysis. A thread 1/14 🧵🧪

Absolute champion pair.

Interesting preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Timely

Extract: The del Mármol lab at Harvard Medical School invites applications for a postdoctoral fellow to study the molecular logic of olfaction, focusing on odorant receptors in arthropods. The role involves bench research, grant writing, and mentoring lab members.

Our paper on olfactory evidence accumulation is now officially published with the final clean version! With @luxorboero.bsky.social, Hao Wu, @josephdzak.bsky.social, @paulmasset.bsky.social, Farhad Pashakhanloo, @siddjakes.bsky.social, @btolooshams.bsky.social & Demba Ba.

Inhalation hazards are yet another component of air quality, usually more in the workplace; less residential. These are made of small particles that can stay suspended (PM2.5), but are often knife-like in shape and hardness and cause serious chronic lung disease.

Also, as a species we emit about 4 times the GHGs globally for heating as we do for cooling. We don’t have these same weird rounds of “should we *really* be heating our houses in the winter?” discourse because it’s what we’ve always done and so obviously needed. Well, cooling is life-saving too.

SA was a must on my trips to the library when I was young. Eventually got it delivered/online when I could finally afford it. So many good regular columns and fantastic articles. This is a loss.

Emergency orders from the Trump administration along with other factors are delaying the retirement of coal-fired power units in Craig, Pueblo and Colorado Springs. Residents, consumer advocates, and doctors statewide agreed that this will worsen public health. From @capitalandmain.bsky.social

"the agency appears to be defying a congressional directive in the final FY 2026 appropriations bill"

For six years, we've been subjected to countless articles about remote work with the central conceit that the discussion is about jobs that CAN be done remotely.

"The reality is, because of what happened and what's happening now, the trust between researchers and the federal government is completely broken."

Explain your @: Robot Nose is my company, founded to find ways to measure air/scent. It's difficult, but I knew it would be and wanted a challenge.

A lot of digital tools are not about reducing work, but rather about redistributing it to a different set of workers. A handy rule of thumb when considering people embracing digital tools is to just see if that person is redistributing their labor or having labor redistributed to them.

The Ascent of Miniproteins pubs.acs.org/doi/10.... --- #proteomics #prot-paper

atomic signs sign, route 550, farmington, new mexico, 1980

Super happy to embark on this new editorial project: the Smell Studies Journal! Currently examining abstracts for our first two issues :) #smellstudies #envhum #sensoryhistory #sensorystudies #chstm

My story 👇👇👇 Not surprised to learn that @repbillfoster.bsky.social, a particle physicist, is just fantastic at asking questions.

There's so little technical information even in this linked preprint it's hard to judge what's going on here. There may be concrete physical principles buried under the Al/ML, but the company apparently wants to keep the details under wraps. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

And here's the smell question! Understandable quotes and replies: there's something primal in grilling food outside.

Shellfish. Crab, clams, shrimp, lobster, all of them I've tried repeatedly, all different kinds of preparation and they're just unpleasant on my palate.

Ozone (O3) in the stratosphere absorbs more harmful UV light from the Sun, but at the surface ozone is not good to breathe. O3 meters are more expensive and less common than other air quality monitors. Ozone has a distinct odor - lighting strikes and laser printers are where it can be smelled.

New study finds increased wildfire smoke has erased 4 years of progress in controlling surface ozone pollution. "Premature deaths from fire-sourced ozone have increased by 318 deaths per year since 2013, with post-2013 mortality 46% higher than pre-2013 mortality." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Peanuts by Schulz: Friday, April 17, 1964

"There is a fly standing on my eyeball but I don’t even care because all I can think about is cake" .. words to live by.

Definitely. I'd prefer a machine to risking mine-sniffing dogs also.

Are GLP-1 Drugs Reshaping Scent Preferences and Perceptions? #Fragrance #Olfaction #CosmeticScience #BeautyIndustryNews #BusinessofBeauty buff.ly/TLyIBnC

"During 2022–2024, wildfire emissions exposed 43 million people to nonattainment conditions, effectively preventing a 4-ppb tightening of the ozone standard."

Here is the article that Dr. Kahn was distributing:

A meta-analysis using the Burden of Proof framework in Nature Health finds that high levels of alcohol consumption were associated with increased risk across all outcomes while potential health impacts at low-to-moderate levels varied by outcome. go.nature.com/4udhKJe #medsky 🧪