Dinosaurs Survived! All 15 designs so far. www.emmalerae.com/store.html

100% this. This is a brilliant metaphor.

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

Clearly ‘I will not use LLMs to generate documents submitted to the court’ needs to become part of the standard retainer agreement.

“Trump EPA declines to protect the environment” is hardly shocking, but “Formal enforcement … is appropriate only when compliance assurance or informal enforcement is inapplicable or insufficient” is not reassuring language in this "pay me to leave you alone today" Presidency.

🧪⚒️ Fine. It’s fine. It’s all fine. As are all the other graphs in this thread. There was a government shutdown at the start of this graph, and they’ve only just passed most of the funding bills - but I’m getting some serious “Congress can give us money but they can’t make us spend it” vibes here.

“You keep the potential boss’s habits in mind”… and protect the student by telling them to stay far, far away? Oh, sorry, thinking like a normal person there.

The negative climate feedback we really don’t want to activate. “while economic modelling traditionally links climate damages to changes in average temperatures, societies and markets suffer most from extremes” Also mentions the mind-bending fact that disaster reconstruction is ‘good’ for GDP.

Bezos has been personally funding his rocket company to the tune of a billion dollars a year for much longer that he’s owned the Washington Post.

“any mantle upwelling will produce carbonated silicate melts of kimberlitic composition…regardless of the buoyancy flux and depth of origin of such upwellings.”

⚒️🌋 somehow I always forget that Santorini is part of a volcanic arc…

Ok, positive scientific thing (for a change): We're going to talk about the work of Yale seismologist Maureen Long, because her work is focused on the most direct evidence of mantle flow and convection we can get. Her career essentially defines our direct knowledge of mantle flow.

I would feel better about SpaceX’s upcoming implosion, except that the likely beneficiary is going to be Jeff freaking Bezos.

I've seen fossils in some remarkable places, but this takes the prize: the benthic foram Nummulites in the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza. These massive blocks were quarried from the Eocene Mokkatam Formation when a relictual population of woolly mammoths still lived on Wrangel Island.

"the EPA announced it would no longer calculate the economic benefits of lives saved when setting limits [on pollution]...From now on, the agency will only tally the costs to industry. The benefits to human beings? Too uncertain to count, according to the EPA."

The list so far of Pioneering Women in Earth Science at this point focused on 18th - early 20th C. In approx order of compilation. Most accounts are brief - but I list as many accessible references as possible. Lots still to write about ⚒️🧪🌊 www.geological-digressions.com/how-to-do-fi...

At least 200 people killed in a landslide in the Rubaya mines. These hand dug coltan mines supply over 15% of the world’s tantalum. www.npr.org/2026/01/31/g...

So the Trump DOE is using a loophole to sidestep the normal regulatory authority for nuclear safety, secretly relaxing their own safety rules, and paying startups to rush-build new reactors. What could possibly go wrong???!!! www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-…

So people are willingly installing something that is not only a huge security risk, but is also free to burn as much computation as it likes - that you have to pay for! - generating fake conversations with other chatbots. Can this stupid bubble just pop already?

This is spot on. When all you have is a mass and an orbit, “Have you met Venus?” remains the best rebuttal overenthusiastic application of the “Earth-like” label.

⚒️ No less than Charles Lyell himself argued that undersea geologists would be the best geologists - and he was more right than he knew!

“The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs…has expressed concerns over the strength of the scientific and economic analysis of the proposed repeal” Climate change is real. Green energy is cheaper. “Nu-uh, because reasons” is not a strong counterargument. How sad.

More serious thoughts about the sand-drama: "Sand" is a rare example of a technical geology term where the common perception is close to the geologic definition. Intro classes (and sci comm) get tricky because we use a lot of familiar words, but with different (or at least more precise) meanings.

The thing that always annoys me is that they do not seem to based on anyone real. As a gestalt of actual conversations he had with actual constituents, I could maybe see the (still weird!) logic. But instead, “the Baileys” are just a way for Chuck Schumer to launder his own preconceptions.

Juno Mission Spots Most Powerful Volcanic Activity on Io to Date - a hotspot larger than Lake Superior in infrared, with a blurry visible light image of what could be lava flows.

Wait. I somehow missed a social media showdown over the definition of sand?

“Particle physics isn’t dead. It’s just hard.” Good reporting on the “stupendously expensive collider yields no new physics” problem, although this nonsense from someone who jumped from particle physics to co-found Anthropic is…just what you’d expect, I guess. www.quantamagazine.org/is-particle-ph…

The 19th century Struve Geodetic Arc is, to me, one of the most extraordinary properties on the World Heritage List. It crosses 10 countries and was used to determine the size and shape of the world. 🧪 🏺 #ContemporaryArchaeology

Temporary lake at Badwater this week, from flash flooding. Death Valley National Park

There aren’t many Republican politicians like Phil Scott any more, but there are surely still Republican-leaning *voters* like him, so this a welcome denunciation, and stand on the correct side of the moral event horizon.

Kīlauea knows the worst is terrible and is trying to make us feel better

There would be no ethical use of generative AI even if it weren't *literally* bankrolling the goddamn gestapo and its concentration camps and providing them the ability to generate infinite nazi propaganda slop. But it is also doing that too.

Finding out that the BBC North American correspondent’s job was 90% copy-pasting takes from the GOP press office was one of the biggest early shocks of my move to the US.

This is a pretty neat tool that helps folks prepare and understand what to do if (when) the power goes out. alexdobrenko.github.io/storm-prep/ #NCwx #SCwx

When you dress like a cartoon villain, ‘dealing with’ is very much not a synonym for ‘care for’.

⚒️ For a bit more historical context on how crazy the current craziness is… www.macrotrends.net/datasets/133...

Sure would have been nice if the Senate had got around to ratifying the Law of the Sea Convention… (Yes, I know the current administration would have claimed they weren’t bound by it anyway, but it would have at least raised the activation energy a bit)

🧪⚒️ “the first giant organisms on the Earth’s surface were not closely related to anything alive today.” Read this whole thread which explains everything wonderfully. Makes you wonder how many other weird and wonderful lineages have been culled over the long grind of Earth’s geologic history…

Definitely worth poking your head into the report, which is much less about current or ongoing threats (like data centres, which understandably aren't a focus in this context) and more about the massive irreversible failures we should be learning to avoid collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10...

🧪🏺 WOWWWW New dates in SE Asia for rock paintings - major implications: - nature of early aesthetics, innovations - relationship to oldest known Australian settlement? - and (IMO) impacts claims that cave art in Europe >50 Ka is necessarily work of #Neanderthals www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This really has been lost in all the discourse about alliance relations: Trump wants to annex a place inhabited by Indigenous peoples. In that sense, his threats very much align with classic American Manifest Destiny and all those white nationalist settler memes shared by the Trump regime.

“We added together imaginary numbers 1000 times” does not a simulation make.

The authors call this a paradox but it is anything but: generative AI, with its ability to quickly generate paper-shaped objects, is just an accelerant in a system that was already rewarding widget production over innovation.

Another cool result shared at #RockyWorlds4: Nearly all sub-Neptunes, if they are gas dwarfs (as opposed to water worlds), should have magma oceans beneath their hydrogen atmospheres. That includes the notorious K2-18b — if it is indeed a gas dwarf and not an ocean planet. Preprint:

⚒️🧪#TIL: 1. There are now multiple sites that appear to show some ammonites surviving a (geologically) short time past the K-Pg boundary. This study reports fossils from Denmark that show no evidence of reworking from older deposits, in rocks that formed 68-200 kyr after the Chicxulub impact.

Philosophical conundrum: does it count as 'seeing' the aurora when my eyes saw nothing but my phone camera revealed this? (from last night in Vermont)

Yeah, what a disproportionate response to… (checks notes) a country that is threatening to invade the sovereign territory of one of their members for no reason other than they want it.

The Greenland crisis is the reductio ad absurdum of Unitary Executive Theory, playing out in real time.

A new preprint, led by Bar Oryan, introduces the Coupling Cloud: a community database that curates, standardizes, documents, and disseminates published kinematic coupling models inverted from geodetic data. As of today it brings together 96 coupling datasets drawn from 55 publications spanning

A thinnie I made for fun. Yes, I now have this expensive bad habit. #peridotite xenoliths in ocean island basalt #OIB from Canary Islands, Spain #geology ⚒️