Visited a remnant of the last ice age in NE Illinois! Volo Bog is the southernmost open-water quaking bog in North America, created in a kettle hole left by a receding glacier about 10,000 years ago. Now a rare habitat for carnivorous plants!

As a Marylander I dunk on Virginia frequently but tonight, good job guys

John Playfair taught my biography subject #WilliamScoresbyJr in his natural history course at the U of Edinburgh in 1806—the epicenter of the Neptunism vs. Vulcanism geological debate. Scoresby leaned Neptunist! His notebook from Playfair's lectures (yes he misspelled Edinburgh on the cover):

Do you love bogs and Halloween? If so, please follow and share this thread to explore the eerie, the dark and the supernatural side of bog ecosystems. BogBoo. 1/ You are terrifying and strange and beautiful, something not everyone knows how to love. -Warsan Shire

Just incredible that a cargo ship made TWO crossings of the Northwest Passage in a single season. 120 years ago it took Roald Amundsen three years to get through the ice that no longer exists

#WilliamScoresbyJr, my biography subject, predicted that bowheads were extremely long-lived due to the length of their baleen back in the 1820s! Now we another clue as to why they’re the longest-lived mammals on Earth

Stolen scrimshaw!

What a metaphor

Senescence at Sugarloaf Mountain (near Comus, Md.)

Welp, after 9+ years, my time as Mental Floss’s science editor has come to an end. I could not have asked for a better bunch of weirdos to be my co-workers (and who also got laid off). You know what this means: a thread of greatest hits! 🧵1/n

Really looking forward to this!

A great lede can be less than 10 words: "The East Wing of the White House is gone." Via @ddiamond.bsky.social @jonathanreports.bsky.social @oliviacgeorge.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Good question. If this was in Manhattan the White House would be covered in sidewalk sheds

It was epic! Thanks @callanbentley.bsky.social !

Hey, were you lucky enough to spot a harlequin duck in Newport, Rhode Island, on February 10, 1991? And did you lose your bird book/life list in the Everglades recently? This person found it! 👇

There are so many people who, despite everything, still want to be journalists. If you call yourself a journalist and choose to use AI to write your stories, please quit so someone else can take your seat.

RIP GOAT Be like Robert. Support badass journalism.

💀

Great Falls of the Potomac never gets old

The loss of any specialist online media is always a sad thing, but the Polar Journal has been an excellent reporter of Artic & Antarctic affairs, so its closure will be very keenly felt - especially when these regions stand in the very frontline of the climate crisis.

I saw the “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center in 1991 and it had a profound impact on my young self. Is this campaign of purely ideological censorship👇 any different?

Looks like we have the data to back up anecdotal evidence that Bluesky is better for science AND science journalists. I used to get tons of ideas for stories, info on new research, and connections on the old place. I hope we can make it even better over here!

Sadly, yet more evidence that the #Svalbard ice of just 200 years ago is gone. William Scoresby Jr, subject of my biography project, described in 1820 glacier fronts 200 meters high where they meet the sea. When I saw the same #glaciers in 2023 they didn’t even reach the shoreline.

2024 glacier loss in Svalbard was beyond imagination! 😱 - Anomaly of up to 4 SD! - Amounts to ~61.7 Gt => 1% of the total ice volume - Comparable to that of the Greenland ice sheet (55 Gt), which is 50 x larger! ... Otherworldly! 🪐 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This guy again. If he spent any time at all with current biographers, he'd know how thoroughly the theoretical topics he suggests are and have been under "serious consideration, or even discussion" not to mention the books and articles written...

Our species, too, has been known to partake. The contemporary Anglosphere/Western distaste for offal and insects is just that: contemporary and Western.

This is an interesting piece. Well worth a read. #ScienceWriting #Journalism 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d44...

Huge hidden flood bursts through Greenland ice sheet surface https://geographical.co.uk/science-environment/huge-hidden-flood-bursts-through-greenland-ice-sheet-surface

Super fascinating explanation of a new paper in Science Advances suggesting that Neanderthals’ original paleo diet included big ol’ piles of ~maggots~

“If there was a toolbox for understanding Antarctica, an icebreaker like the [RV Nathaniel B.] Palmer is ‘the hammer.’”

“Those islands don’t know what it’s like to be a natural ecosystem without humans.” A fascinating look at how Indigenous peoples in the Southeast U.S. shaped coastal islands with oyster shells over 5,000 years 🏺🧪

I HAVE GROWN TOMATOES IN MY GARDEN

Important thread from scientists on the ground in Svalbard: “We came ready to dig snowpits & drill frozen soils. But we sampled thawed ground, bare-handed, with a spoon 💦 We came for snow sampling. But we got rain 🌧️ It felt like we’d prepared for the Arctic of the past.”

“Knowing how sound propagates, where currents flow, or how ice forms and moves can determine success or failure, especially in environments such as the Arctic, where rapid warming is transforming the strategic landscape.”

One benefit of the daily thunderstorms and record humidity in D.C. this month is 🍄 Mushroom Mania 🍄 in my local woods! Please help ID. All taken today at Lake Needwood in Rockville, Md.

A State Department employee shared with PBS News an image from inside the department. The image includes a piece of paper taped to a mirror with the words, "Colleagues, if you remain: RESIST FASCISM. Remember the oath you vowed to uphold."

What if a forest closed without warning? That's the fear for #Patuxent Research Refuge, where #RachelCarson discovered the harms of DDT. Part of it is opens one day a week. Only five staffers monitor the entire 12,000 acres. #Trumpcuts @sejorg.bsky.social www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/cl...

Are there any folks in science journalism space in NY, or the US in general who would be interested in doing a story on the Paleontological Research Institution? They are one of the 10 largest fossil museums in the US and desperately need ~1-2million dollars by December to pay off their mortgage 🧪

Dear Science Journalists, Please mention when your write-ups covers work that was funded by federal agencies that are now being dismantled, defunded, and censored. The public needs to know what is being lost, and if you don't tell them in the context of Cool New Science, who will?

The NEH has been a singular force for bringing people together. In this moment of hate, fear and isolation, the NEH helped us learn about our past and about each other. Today we are losing almost all of the NEH public servants. We are all in their debt. A national shame. A profound cultural loss.

Worth noting today that the entire budget of the NEH is about $200M.

My sweetbay magnolia bought from Home Depot’s clearance shelf last fall is actually blooming! 🥹

Adding paragliding to my list of things I have less than zero interest in ever doing (the other three things on the list are jogging, climbing Mt. Everest, and cave diving)

RIP to John Tyler’s grandson and my favorite cocktail party fact 😭 www.cbsnews.com/news/harriso...

Mercator produced the first map solely dedicated to the Arctic regions, posthumously published in 1595. While a product of its time, the Septentrionalium Terrarum Descriptio is laden with features now known to be entirely mythical or significantly misrepresented. A 🧵

Five fave black & white movies: Double Indemnity Strangers on a Train Battleship Potemkin The Big Sleep Psycho

No journalist should be using the phrase “b*g b*******l b**l,”even in quotation marks

You love to see it

Lots of people on my feed are concerned about the destruction of NOAA by the Trump administration and Elon Musk, but much of what I’ve seen people post about is the national weather service. That’s vital, but NOAA does so much more than that! My latest, for @ucsusa.bsky.social 🧪🌎🦑🐠