Ammonia was tentatively detected in the Venusian cloud decks by Pioneer Venus and Venera 8. Astrobiologists theorised that ammonia might be produced by microbes as a survival strategy to neutralise acid. New research suggests a more mundane, abiotic explanation 🔭🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A Starlink convoy passing over southeast England 🛰️🔭 #astrophotography

Lidl sells Ukrainian wine! It comes from the Bolgrad vineyards in the vicinity of Lake Yalpuh, Odesa Oblast 🇺🇦🔱🌻

Us humans may not like the constant rain, but the frogs are loving it 🐸💦

Homemade exoplanet meme 🪐🔭🧪

Bit late to the party...WGS based oral microbiome GWAS makes Nature! Some very cool bacterial functional associations are discussed in the paper. Check it out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪

New paper is finally out!! All about the potential for cryovolcanism on Umbriel, one of the mysterious satellites of Uranus: doi.org/10.1029/2025...

I’ve submitted the last piece of coursework for my Advanced Human Genetics module. That’s one module out of four done for my Postgraduate Diploma 🧬💻🧪

Although we still don’t fully understand what Vaults do in nature, that hasn’t stopped Chao et al. from engineering it into a time capsule to sequester mRNAs, allowing researchers to investigate gene expression at multiple time points for the same cell 🧪🧫 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"Rien que du sang et des douilles" : témoignage exclusif d’un manifestant iranien www.france24.com/fr/asie-paci...

Somewhere I still have the hand-drawn revision diagram I did of a bacterial flagellum for my first year undergrad exams 🧪

Tending to my kefir 🥛🦠

I will be pronouncing the “f” in the future tense of Irish verbs and there is nothing anyone can do to stop me #speirgorm

'There were no fancy pieces of equipment, no incomprehensible statistical analyses (...) Instead, it merely involved a researcher, some petri dishes & a lab book in which to record the results of crosses that were intellectually complex to conceive of, but which were remarkably simple to carry out.'

I propose that the planets of TRAPPIST-1 be given names from the Hindu pantheon, as follows: • TRAPPIST-1: Brahma • b: Vishnu • c: Shiva • d: Ganesha • e: Parvati • f: Lakshmi • g: Saraswati • h: Kali or Indra Explanations in the following skeets 🔭🔴🌒

Would you dare to stand up against the wrath of a star?! Brave little Venus does... and still has an atmosphere! ☀️💨🪐🧲 Next #RockyWorldsDiscussion on Thu 5 Feb @ 14:00 UTC features Moa Persson on "Venus: Defying the Solar Wind Without a Magnetic Shield" More: www.rockyworlds.org/event-detail... 🧪🔭

First crocuses of spring, including what I suspect is a honeybee, assuming it’s not some fly with Batesian mimicry 🌷🐝🪰

Who knew yaks and humans had so much in common 🦬🧬💀🧪

Alberts et al.’s legendary textbook « Molecular Biology of the Cell » costs an arm and a leg. Luckily, I was able to get this German translation from Leipzig for only £16 🧪🧫📚🇩🇪

Join us 🔴LIVE🔴 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, February 2nd, from 7:00 a.m. EST / 12:00 UTC, as NASA conducts a Wet Dress Rehearsal for the first crewed mission to launch towards the Moon since 1972, Artemis II. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjDr...

I saw this today and then chipped my front lower incisor on my fork whilst eating some spare ribs 🍴

This is what Peter Davison saw before he turned into Colin Baker 😵‍💫

From what I can gather about predatory publishers, it’s MDPI maybe Frontiers avoid like the plague 🧪📚

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It's a real full-circle moment because rhetoric that was refined in anti-trans propaganda is now being turned around to argue against gay marriage. Note the renewed focus on children and the deployment of "biological parents" as a more-naturalized, more 'legitimate' category.

Why is every DVD nowadays £30 and out of print 🎥🎞️📀

Tantalising single-transit detection of a 1.06R🜨 planet in the outer habitable zone of an orange dwarf star. Mass, and hence composition, are still unknown 🟠🪐🔭 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

A Cambrian soft-bodied biota after the first Phanerozoic mass extinction | nature www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Stub articles on Irish Wikipedia are called “síolta”, meaning “seeds” 🌱

Alrighty, I think that’s enough work done on my presentation for one evening 🧠🧪💻

Ensembl is very slow tonight 🧬🧪

Using machine learning to sort over 80,000 bacterial genomes into aerobes and anaerobes, researchers find that oxygen-breathing bacteria likely evolved in local oxygen-rich environments 200–400 million years before the Great Oxidation Event. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/jZWQ50Y3LhU

The study shows that nitrogenase enzymes have maintained stable isotope signatures over billions of years, revealing how ancient #microbes shaped Earth’s #nitrogen cycle and offering a new experimental framework for probing early life. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I feel I’m almost getting to the point where I can read Wikipedia articles in Irish. Ultimately something I’d love to do is add to the articles myself once I’m a fully-fledged Gaeilgeoir. It would be a nice way to give back #speirgorm

The observation that Alzheimer’s disease and cancer rarely coincide has uncovered the ability of a tumour by-product to break up harmful protein aggregates in the brain 🧠🧪 www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

I was confused as to whether Irish “ar” triggers eclipsis, lenition or both, and it turns out to actually be three separate words in a trenchcoat #speirgorm #langsky

Currently harvesting papers for the final assignment of my module 📑🧬🧪

Iranian women have more balls than American men.

Caraway seed cake made this evening. I used a doubled-up version of Grace Mulligan’s recipe «The Farmhouse Kitchen Baking Book». I further tweaked it by using large eggs instead of medium, increasing the concentration of caraway seeds by 50% and adding a teaspoon of vanilla extract 🍰🍽️

I found a mass of crab shells washed up on Goring Beach today, is anyone able to identify the species for me?

very sincerely, please be aware that no one on social media, least of all massive accounts, is going to give you advance warning of u.s. miltary action except by accident speaking assuredly about unknowable things drives traffic but you are better off going out and touching grass

In lighter news, Arabic and Turkish have joined my dictionary collection 📚 #langsky

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

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Open access and highly informative, give yourself a treat and take a look 🧬

In Iran sollen tausende Menschen getötet worden sein. Seit Donnerstag ist das Netz dort blockiert. Was bedeutet der Internet-Blackout für die Menschen? FAQs von @jeanbaeck.bsky.social und mir auf @taz.de: taz.de/Massenprotes...

Made it through my epicardial ablation. Apparently I gave the electrophysiologists quite the challenge, but after 6 hours all the faulty circuits had been blocked and no ventricular tachycardia could be induced #arvc #cardiomyopathy 🫀

Solidarity with the protestors in #Iran; I hope the theocracy will soon be toppled and the Iranian people will get the freedom, justice and agency they deserve

Getting settled in at the hospital for my epicardial ablation tomorrow. I’ve already had an endocardial ablation to manage my arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, but as my arrhythmias were coming from the outside of my heart, I’ll need an ablation there to set things right #ARVC

Climbed up a hill last night to get a proper vantage point of Gemini, Jupiter, Sirius, Orion and Uranus 🌌🔭