"AI‑generated pornography challenges us to rethink some of our assumptions about intimacy, consent, and agency in the digital age." Guess it's something we need to start talking about, also with regard to impact on people in that industry as well. 🧪 Original study: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Vests have become a bit of a cheat code for me when traveling for work. So long as it's cool enough to wear them.

Time for the final strech, which means it's time to get behind rust (fine, hematite, rust may also have goethite)

Me: About to post a minor rant about publication rate this year. Email: Your* paper has been accepted. *Not mine-mine, a colleague took the led on that one. I'll post about it when it goes online. It's super cool, but no funding awarded for continuation of work ("no proof of concept").

Why can't lab suppliers have prices on anything in their websites? I really don't want to spend twelve hours on the phone with them and send twelve emails just to find out that something is out of our price range.

Life, has changed this planet fundamentally. One cannot look at the integrated shifts through the Proterozoic and into the Phanerozoic and not see how biology terraformed this planet. 🧪⚒️

Just 1 hour to go, get it while you still can!

Side note, I like a lot of things about LibreOffice, and I recommend people to use it personally rather than pay for MS-Office. But its spell checker suck. (in the sense that it recommends the wrong word more often than spell checkers on other systems)

It's kind of neat that someone's research is shooting ice with particle beams... also, ah, the result might mean that potential signs of life / precursor chemicals for life on Enceladus were a false positive, which is a bit of a bummer. 🧪 Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Just over 12h left to get this bundle. Reach out and get it while you can.

One of the weirder oceanic things is Whiting Events, when the sea turns milky white with little aragonite crystals. They were first recognized in the Bahamas, then in the Persian Gulf, we found indications in the Med, and now reported in the Red Sea. 🧪🌊 Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Well... I've been kicking the can on this project for a while; time to actually start. #Miniatures I'm not collecting WH40K (not really, I don't even have a game group). There is a story behind it (and it's an #AcademicSky one). 👇 cont.

This is the hardest choice for me yet -- I have to go with #taenite here because Widmanstätten patterns are my favourite material phenomena (what better collision of my materials science and astro engineering backgrounds?) #MinCup25

We have a new paper out! Using a combination of carbon and neodymium isotopes, we traced the exchange of water from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean south of Australia over the Neogene and how orbital forcing modulated it. 🧪⚒️ Link: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Let the year and its curses end, may a new year begin, blessings with it. שנה טובה

A must shout out to Francisco Sánchez, Berry Pinshow, and Carmi Korine of my alma mater (as well as Mariana Melcón) for winning an Ig Nobel for their work on drunk bats. 🧪 I am so envious. Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Trying to put myself in a better headspace for New Year's tonight, so how about a review rather optimism is a good or bad thing? (the answer, naturally, is "it depends, but overall it has its benefits") 🧪 Link: compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I might make some version of this joke every year at some point (possibly about the same mineral at one point!) but I’m voting for #dioptase because I too generate an electric charge under heat. #MinCup25

Spent half the morning revising a subchapter, to try and explain something, only to realize it's probably an artifact and the entire data set might be biased... which is a core argument we already made in the text about it 🤦

Checked out @danaterrace.bsky.social, @zach2themax.bsky.social and @johnbaileyowen.bsky.social's Knights of Guinevere. Wow, that is a ride. Dark, critical, disturbing, and subversive in all the right ways. Not for all, but something Western animation was missing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCAd...

#Kosmochlor comes from space, #titanite helps preserve my archean fossils. Who to vote for!?

So, just how well did Mediterranean coral reefs handle the restriction and cooling of the Miocene? Not that great. If in the (warm) Oligocene they calcified near the upper end of modern rates, by the Late Miocene they dropped to below the modern median. 🧪⚒️ Link: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The Queer Your eReader event is over, but if you missed it and still want to grab some awesome queer ebooks - the itch.io bi/pan mega-bundle (organized by @impavid.us) still has a few days to it. itch.io/b/3263/bi-vi...

I had one look at the emblem on the banner, and had to print and paint it. #Miniature #MiniPainting #3DPrinting

For one day - Queer Your eReader! Grab some books from multiple genres - Fantasy, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi & Mystery/Thriller! divinationhollow.com/queer-your-e...

Just before the non-avian dinosaurs went to that farm upstate, the ocean became less salty, probably due to paleogeographic changes. That seems to drive some seas to be more stratified and causing oxygen stress in some localities. 🧪⚒️ Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It's nice when people you know cite your paper (please keep doing that 🙏), but it's actually much nicer when people you don't know cite it - it tells you there is a larger audience for what you do outside your immediate community (and also helps with that H-Index). #AcademicSky

Tough choice: The one looks like a marten gnawed on the Large Hadron Collider or the one that looks a vampire dragged a body through a Fort Lauderdale fine art gallery Gotta go with mustelid attack and vote #Carpathite #MinCup25

We need to stop thinking about kink as a binary thing--that you're either kinky or you aren't. Kink runs on a spectrum, and we all exhibit some degree of kinkiness, whether we self-identify as "kinky" or not. www.sexandpsychology.com/blog/2024/9/...

The @divinationhollow.bsky.social organized Queer Your eReader event is now in full swing with a great collection of SFF, romance, and mystery ebooks (including one of mine) available for free until the end of the 20th. 🪐📚💙| 🌈📚🌶️ divinationhollow.com/queer-your-e...

Coal-burning byproducts are full of useful, but environmentally horrible, heavy metals (like uranium). We have piles of these from back in the day (and unfortunately still making more). How about extracting those metals rather than mining virgin ore? 🧪 Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I'm fairly sure some dispensers of men's clothing would have an enurisem if asked to provide anything that isn't in those one and a half exact silhouettes and in a color that isn't grey, black, or brown... maybe blue.

An interesting video essay by Andrew Henry (ReligionForBreakfast), who knows a thing or two about how IRL religion works, on how to give more substance to fictional faiths in #worldbuilding. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjrr...

As a reminder - this is coming up tomorrow. A pile of books, for free, celebratined multiple forms of queerness. If you like any of them, you can also support the authors by posting a review or rating somewhere. (If you didn't - move on. No need to be an asshole about a book you got for free)

#WeekendReading: Tachikawa et al. about the neodymium isotopic composition in the modern Mediterranean Sea and what it might mean for paleocirculation proxies. 🧪🌊 Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1999: Global solar power exceeds 1000 MW. 2012: Global solar power exceeds 100,000 MW. 2022: Global solar power exceeds 1,000,000 MW. 2024: Global solar power exceeds 2,000,000 MW.

Once again, I have to be team #hematite...

And now, for your viewing pleasure, the sunset that was playing out over the beach outside as I was busy wrapping up an experiment in the lab. 🌊

We can't have innovation if we block out those with new ideas or who challenge old ones. Reviewers can challenge without being assholes, and we need to acknowledge such behaviors exist and need to be expunged. 🧪

<sigh> Time to teach the speller a bunch of words again. I don't care how annoying they are to keep alive, in the paper I need to call them Infaunal, not Infernal.

It's Bi Visibility Week, and our Itch Bundle is live now! Featuring 50 books across many genres by 50 Bi and Pan Authors for only $50 - this is a great opportunity to fill up your book collection and support Bi authors while you're at it! itch.io/b/3263/bi-vi...

So a person I care deeply about threw away my personal copy of the magazine issue in which my first novelette was published. It was by accident, and I have the original files. But the magazine is now defunct, so it can't be replaced. I can't be mad, but it hurts a bit. #WritingCommunity

Coral reefs are dying, but what would replace them? Probably algae, most likely green and brown algae that can survive at higher temperatures. 🧪🌊 (At some point, I'll make a post about reef builders of the high-temperature geological past) Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

It's always the last sample of the experiment where something goes wrong (results look fine so far... but still).

#MinCup25 Round 2 Match 2: It's all about how minerals interact with humans as dramatic #stibnite faces off against futuristic #perovskite. Vote: www.mineralcup.org/2025/vote/r2... Results: www.mineralcup.org/2025/results...

Interested in doing a PhD in environmental research at Oxford? We offer fully-funded positions through ILESLA, now open for applications at iles.web.ox.ac.uk! Happy to discuss applications with students whose interests align with modelling marine dispersal or oceanic forcing of coral reefs.

A post by @grnfluoresceblg.bsky.social made me think about the fact that there is an entire genre of Israeli SF works about a messianic religious right takeover and the apocalyptic implications. As many were not translated, here is a collection of a few. 🧵1/7 🪐📚💙

#MinCup25 Round 2 Match 1: It's a pair of striking blue beauties as #pectolite the uncrushable faces off against #hauyne, the phoenix from volcanic ashes! Vote: www.mineralcup.org/2025/vote/r2... Results: www.mineralcup.org/2025/results...

It is very popular to blame social media on many of the world's woes. At times - it is justified. There are many other ongoing processes enhancing political polarization, but we're coming up on a decade of work showing that social media makes it worse. 🧪 Link: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Is the term slop-pop already taken? (also, losing in a popular vote to an AI trained on your own work, ouch) www.bbc.com/news/article...