Today’s hilarious story from the grading archives involves our old friend AI. So the phenomena that my students focus on as they learn evolution and natural selection is horses. Specifically we track how horses changed throughout the Cenozoic Era. 🧪🧬🍎⚒️

It's cruel irony that just when the news about the #Ebola epidemic broke, the last of Patrice Lumumba's murderers died of natural causes without ever facing trial.

Not that I ever took it personally when I was in the lab. #chemsky #chemchat

One of the great joys of growing up is realizing you can simply become interested in things for their own sake. Nobody can stop you from suddenly learning everything about oak galls or metallurgy or octopuses or the history of epidemiology. And I think that's beautiful.

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

Ich weiß, es gibt schlimmeres, aber die El-Niño-Berichterstattung geht mir grad überproportional auf die Nüsse.

A freshly discovered outbreak will grow very rapidly in the first weeks after detection. Especially if it has gone on for a while. So it will appear to grow a lot faster than it does in reality.

Sneaking a giant screen into the flagshagger march is one of the funniest things @ledbydonkeys.org have ever done. "STAY HYDRATED" 😂🤣😂

There will be a lot of talk, now that Bundibugyo strain is confirmed, about how this is bad because we don't have a vaccine. This misses the point. The real issue is that the region has armed conflict ongoing and insufficient medical infrastructure. #ebola

Here we go: Official declaration from the DRC that "laboratory analyses conducted by the National Institute of Biomedical Research on May 14, 2026, on 13 blood samples, have confirmed 8 positive cases of Ebola virus disease, Bundibugyo strain" 5 samples had too little volume to be analyzed

Saw another whale shark today in the Maldives! I think this is the best video I’ve ever taken of any wild animal! 🧪🌎🦑🐟🦈

🤭 Older people will remember the time when americans "killed al-qaeda's number two" about every three weeks. It went on for years IIRC (or at least long enough to become a running gag)

This is really great science and I hope it gets some attention before the next pandemic - respiratory viruses can spread through apartments via bathroom vents. I remember reading about a similar 2003 case. www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/vir...

"Sehr hohe Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass die Meerenge von Hormus erstmal geschlossen bleibt". Wer hätte gedacht – außer zahllosen Fachleuten –, dass fossile Transportwege einmal zum Ziel von Kriegen werden könnten? www.zeit.de/politik/ausl...

Rattail fishes swim alongside the ROV at Axial Seamount. Rattails are highly efficient swimmers attracted to any disturbance, so they are one of the most commonly seen fish during deep-sea operations. But we never get tired of watching them! 🌊🚢🧪 VC: UW/NSF-OOI/WHOI, J2-1729, V25; ed: E. Pinneo (UW)

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that likely fewer people will be freaking out publicly about Hanta www.dw.com/en/ebola-out...

Im Grunde wie bei Star Trek. Also fast. "Beam me up, Scotty." "Wegen einer verzögerung im Betriebsablauf beginnt der Transport mit einer Verspätung von 35 Minuten und heute abweichend in Transporterraum 3, Käptn."

Möglicherweise will Özdemir als Ministerpräsident einen Fahrkurs machen.

Remember that there are up to 200 000 cases of human #Hantavirus infections each year. Probably many more, since especially old world Hantaviruses apparently often only cause flu-like symptoms. Testing for it may well ramp up now, so expect tons of unrelated cases to turn up over the next week. 🧪

When looking at the possibility of further Hantavirus spread, it's worth remembering what happened with Mpox or Ebola. The situations there were somewhat similar to Hanta. Those were viruses that infected people, but couldn't effectively spread, so outbreaks remained small. Until they didn't. 1/

Slightly increase a band Twenty-four Centimeter Nails

Viel Liebe für @fischblog.bsky.social für diesen Rant! 🫶🫶🫶 youtube.com/shorts/u1DUm...

Für Blackrock war #Merz ne Enttäuschung. Nicht sonderlich lernfähig. Und als Netzwerker überschätzt. War nicht so schlimm. Da war er nur ne Nebenfigur. Bei #BlackRot darf Fritz Kanzler spielen. Für die Wähler ist Fritz eine Enttäuschung. Nicht sonderlich lernfähig. Und als Netzwerker überschätzt.

If you have anyone in your life that uses voice-to-text on their phone a lot, I highly recommend requesting that they say "captain's log" each time before doing so.

Moin (sound on 🐦‍⬛🐦🦆)

I'm fairly jaded when it comes to reading the news and I generally don't spit out my tea even at the most ridiculous developments. But I had to wipe the floor after this perfect punchline in the end. #ukraine #russia

Legit. 🤭 www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/o...

Liegenddemo für #MECFS in #Münster

Gestern haben wir #AnnesKampf in Würselen bei Aachen gespielt. Ich bin sehr dankbar, dass wir mit dem Referenten der KZ Gedenkstätte einen tollen jungen Mann kennengelernen durften. Aber es waren auch zwei Faschos im Publikum. Unklar, warum sie überhaupt da waren. 1/

Nature is healing.

In Weinheim (Bergstr.) wollen Faschos am Bahnhof herumnerven (18:30 Uhr). Aus der Region, wer kann: Kommt zur Gegendemo. #161 Ansonsten teilen, bitte, danke. 💜

#Hantavirus auf Kreuzfahrtschiff: Wie gefährlich ist der Ausbruch? Spektrum-Podcast mit @fischblog.bsky.social open.spotify.com/episode/00LW...

If, and that's a big if, this Hantavirus really is transmitted from humans to humans on occasion, this is going to be fun. For a certain value of fun, naturally.

Hantavirus: was it really human-to-human transmission and if so, will we all die? So currently the idea of hanta transmission between humans get a lot of attention. But this is not b/c it's most likely. It's just the possibility that we need to respond to at scale. 1/

🌲 CT scan of an Allocasuarina tessellata cone. With thanks to the National X-ray Computed Tomography group.

Hanta-Infektionen sind übrigens nicht mal selten. Sie treffen nur überwiegend ärmere Bevölkerungsgruppen im ländlichen Raum. Btw eines der wenigen Viren, bei dem das hämorrhagische Fieber der weniger gefährliche Krankheitsverlauf ist.

The uterus organoid that can menstruate sounds a lot like the disembodied headache from Terry Pratchett... (in "Hogfather", the Oh God of Hangovers) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It comes in doses of 9mm each and after the first injection you stop aging instantly.

Heute ist der Internationale #TagderPressefreiheit. Dieses hohe Gut steht in vielen Ländern der Welt unter Druck: Reporter:innen werden bedroht, inhaftiert oder anderweitig zum Schweigen gebracht. Mo., 4.5. 19 h in der Stabi: „The Algorithm is the Message. Die unsichtbare Grenze der Pressefreiheit“

Do we have enough brain in our plastic to fill that spoon? Just asking.

...and it would cost only about five times as much as decarbonizing the whole world. #climate 🧪

It's worth bearing in mind that increasing the healthy life span beyond, say, 200 years will require fundamentally different approaches than what increased life span so far. Most of these are little more than wild ideas at this point. 🧪

It's not that I'm unhappy about my body or something. He still does whatever I need him to do and so on. It would just be nice if things didn't hurt all the time.

Chlorine Triflourode is a “molecule” in the same way a guy, his wife who he cheated on, his mistress who just dumped him, and the raccoon in his back yard are a “family.”

Train is now 5 minutes late. Need a bigger sword.

Today I have my rather large sword with me on the train. The train is perfectly on time. Correlation is not causation. 🤭

I love it when people excitedly write "AI agrees with my idea" like that means anything. It's a bit cute like seven year-olds discovering that "dog" is "god" written backwards and finding it of great significance. (yes, there was a post like that first thing I opened this app)

Viruses are srsly weird.

Natürlich unterliegt der Mensch noch natürlicher Selektion. Das war auch vorher schon bekannt. bemerkenswert ist, wie viele Genabschnitte die da jetzt identifiziert haben wollen. Bisher kannte man etwa zwei Dutzend, hier sind es fast 500. Was also steckt dahinter? 1/ (Artikel hinter Paywall)

Just read that the Pope is legally entitled to run for the office of US President in 2028 and now I can't stop giggling. 🤭 (The only problem is that he is currently the head of state of another country, but it's just possible that no one thought of that possibility when writing the law)