Some of my cyanotypes for World Cyanotype Day!

For my angry squirrel people www.popsci.com/environment/...

Happy fat bear week everybody 🐻

(let this also be a public service announcement to NOT TOUCH BATS especially if they are acting weird, ie letting you touch them. Rabies is a terrible way to die, and getting the series of rabies shots to stop you from dying is not super relaxing. DO NOT TOUCH BATS.)

The toxin in pufferfish - Tetrodotoxin (TTX) - is a sodium channel blocker that inhibit the ability of nerves to send signals or carry messages, hence the symptom of TTX intoxication is paralysis. So it is not physiologically possible to get "high" off pufferfish

They don't - it's a common myth started by the Dolphins: Spy in the Pod documentary www.discovermagazine.com/do-stoned-do...

Look “space green” kosmochlor may be of meteorite origin and occasionally carved as it’s associated with jadeite, but blue kyanite definitely gets the arts vote for jewelry and use in porcelain and pottery glazes. Plus is gets physics points as an index metal. #MinCup25

Day 27 #SciArtSeptember prompt bounded made me think of electrons and how whether they are bounded or free determines the nature of materials so I’m sharing my portrait of Millie Dresselhaus (née Spiewak; November 11, 1930 – February 20, 2017). 🧪🐡👩🏼‍🔬 #histsci She was a professor of physics & 🧵

The government is reducing service standards and Canada Post’s biggest advantage: its nationwide network. This plan is about cutting back the postal service instead of investing to give it new revenue tools through things like postal banking. It’s shameful.

After #tugtupite surged ahead by 61 votes, #perovskite started gaining. The gap is currently at 21 votes and shrinking. 1.5 hours left to pick a #MinCup25 semi finalist!

Canada Post “lost” 1 billion dollars last year? How about, “it cost Canadians 1 billion dollars to have a national postal service” which works out to costing about $25 a year per person (population of Canada in 2024 = 40 million). Seems like a pretty reasonable cost to me.

#SciArtSeptember Day 26: forage • One of my hand paresthesia pieces—push, pull, & tingle (2018)—since we use our hands to forage. It also fits with #MigraineAwarenessWeek since my migraines worsen the tingling in my hands. #SciArt #embroidery

With Canada Post on strike again, I have updated my post on alternative shipping in Canada and to international destinations, with small businesses in mind. Updates include information about tariffs and the end of de minimis

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

The 11yo’s chosen PA day activity is to Wreck This Journal

Day 26 #SciArtSeptember prompt forage. My #linocut of #botanist Isabella Aiona Abbott (1919-2010), 🧪🐡👩🏻‍🔬 #histsci renown algae expert, celebrated seaweed cook, devoted teacher & mentor, expert on Hawaiian ethnobotany, the first Indigenous Hawaiian woman to earn a doctorate in science & the first woman

I’ll grant that it’s cool that “Borg cube” perovskite could be formed in a Brown Dwarf but I’m voting for reindeer blood tugtupite “King of Fluorescent Minerals,” which is tenebrescent (changes colour in UV) & phosphorescent so gains my physics vote plus it’s also a gem on the arts front #MinCup25

Happy birthday to #neuroscientist Hendrik Van der Loos (1929-1993) shown in my #linocut with his discovery (along with medical student Thomas Woolsey), of the barrel cortex, with the mouse head & whiskers linked directly to it. 🧪🐡 #histsci Some species of rodents have a region of the somatosensory

This has not been an easy year to run an online business. It’s hard enough trying to deal with sending packages over the border with all the nonsense going on. I need my government to properly fund our post office which is an essential service. Another postal strike is so disheartening.

Canada Post workers go on a nationwide strike reut.rs/3Iw2WUw

HEY @joellightbound.bsky.social @mark-carney.bsky.social This is not cool! Canada Post is an essential service, stop trying to treat it like a profit-making business! This is the wrong time (it's never the right time) for austerity measures that hit the most vulnerable Canadians hardest.

My face, as I campaign for minerals in art, when I see the #MinCup25 voters swayed against mineral titans of art history, like voting for “Borg crystals” over calcite and pro-werewolves against silver. 😱 Give me hematite you rock nerds! Without hematite we couldn’t have this:

Vote Hematite for Mars! For its redness and for everyone's favourite Martian rover. #MinCup25 #sciart

MARS ROCK MARS ROCK MARS ROCK Vote #hematite #MinCup25

This story is in the news this month, September 2025. Here is a link to “Earth Wind-Driven Formation of Hematite on the Lunar Surface” by Xiandi Zeng et. al.: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

#Hematite provides important clues about planets and their atmospheres. There should not be Hematite on the Moon, but there is, near the poles, on east- and equator-facing sides of highlands. Scientists make the case that O ions in Earth’s wind oxidize Fe on the Moon. 1/2 #MinCup25

Like a mariner, a viking, do explore On an odyssey of curiosity Insight of a phoenix lets us hope for more Perseverance with each opportunity #MinCup25 #MinPoem #hematite #Mars

Boy, is this ever Heartbreak City. I mean, #Haüyne is a blue beauty, but #Hematite has been my favorite since I was a kid here on Earth, while it was also turning Mars red. How can I say no to that? See ya in #MinCup26 haüyne, as I’m pushing hard for hematite in #MinCup25! (Alt text for more.)

#MinCup25 #MinPoem #hematite

Vote hematite for showing us this version of our planet! #MinCup25 #MinCup www.mineralcup.org/2025/vote/r3...

Check out this gallery of hematite images and vote for this beautiful mineral! #MinCup25 www.mindat.org/gm/1856

#MinCup25 votes were tied when I voted just now. #Hematite has my vote from a planetary science perspective.

This round has been a dead heat since it started. If you haven’t already voted, go vote for hematite! #MinCup25 www.mineralcup.org/2025/vote/r3...

I entered my 'In the Garden' block printed pattern of wildflowers and pollinators in the Spoonflower Garden Tapestry competition. I'd love if you would vote for it here: www.spoonflower.com/design-chall...

Their bot doesn't even know what artistic nudity is, apparently. I've had this moderation setting toggled to "show" for as long as I can remember, and totally innocuous art and photos (e.g., figure studies, gym selfies, etc.) get miscategorized as sexually explicit content. Meanwhile, untagged gore?

haüyne X hematite, #MinCup25, quarterfinal 1. #minerals #sciart

Tiger Iron is a metamorphosed banded iron formation (BIF) from Australia. It consists of shimmering golden tiger’s eye, red jasper, and jet black hematite. More at comment below. #MinCup25 ⚒️ sci-fi 🧪 🖖🏼 scifi Geosciences #WomenInSTEM geology 🔭🪐 #hematite

Haüyne, formed in magma chambers, is pretty, blue & can fluoresce. But electrically conductive iron-ore hematite is an absolute giant of art history, used as red ochre, going back at least 164,000 years to Pinnacle Point Caves! Also called Venetian, mars or English red. Vote hematite! #MinCup25

Labelled “adult content” for that risqué Renaissance painting I guess. Cause machines and algorithms can’t think. 🤪

Haüyne, formed in magma chambers, is pretty, blue & can fluoresce. But electrically conductive iron-ore hematite is an absolute giant of art history, used as red ochre, going back at least 164,000 years to Pinnacle Point Caves! Also called Venetian, mars or English red. Vote hematite! #MinCup25

This is such a nuanced and big-hearted piece on the evolution of autism as a diagnosis, by an anthropologist of mental health who is also the dad of a now-grown daughter on the spectrum. Great reading (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

Day 25 #SciArtSeptember prompt tireless: 🧪🐡👩🏼‍🔬 #histsci Kathleen Lonsdale DBE FRS (née Yardley, 1903-1971) who solved a longstanding #chemistry conundrum of the shape of benzene, here with her drawing of electron density for hexachlorobenzene (green) & model of hexamethylbenzene. Her husband said, 🧵

My mother is selling her house & called me in a small panic about the story of the ‘turtles, all the way down’ anecdote because she thought a visitor would quiz her on it. I told her it was like a physics urban legend but it appears, amongst other places in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time

#SciArtSeptember: Reef Threadfin butterflyfish #Art

Both radioactive green sklodowskite & jet black phantom mannardite looking like a welter of spiders in glass look ready for spooky season. Both are named for scientists (Marie Skłodowdka-Curie & Dr. George William Mannard, Canadian exploration geologist for whom my Dad worked). 🤔 #MinCup25

Day 24 #SciArtSeptember prompt numbered: the 2nd woman to win the Nobel Prize for #physics: German-American theoretical #physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972). 🧪🐡👩🏼‍🔬 #histsci As the series of increasingly large atomic nuclei grows with additional nucleons (protons p & neutrons n) from hydrogen 🧵

Happy 100th anniversary to Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s extraordinary thesis!