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• Post #4501384

  OK, hear me out - tentacle hentai sort of makes sense... at least as far as that suckers and tentacles are likely appendages aliens species might have. They show up often enough across many groups here on Earth. Link: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202203.0324 #Evolution #Worldbuilding

• Post #4475658

  In Frederik Pohl's Gateway, he describes the "food mines". Growing fungi on organic-rich rocks to feed the masses. IRL, there are entire natural ecosystems that are organized around such a base. Link: https://academic.oup.com/ismej/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ismejo/wrag184/8744037 #SciFiScience #fungi #ecology

• Post #4441685

  "... participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think... many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts." Link: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1250830 #Cognition #Boredom #Psychology

• Post #4408616

  In retrospect, it makes sense, but I really didn't expect the difference in the ratio of ATP to carbon to be multiple orders of magnitude between plants and animals. (Mobility is energy-intensive) Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004226022273 #Worldbuilding #Metabolism #Energy

• Post #4389491

  At this point, I was involved, directly or indirectly, in the mentorship of students and postdocs from 12 countries (🇳🇱🇮🇹🇩🇪🇬🇷🇮🇱🇮🇷🇷🇺🇨🇳🇮🇳🇰🇪🇳🇬🇺🇸). Each of them was their own person, but there were some common communication issues, some of which cultural. They are what this thread is about. 1/ 🧵 #AcademicChatter #Mentoring

• Post #4371693

  Something I didn't know until recently about mitochondria is that different cells have different types of them, and there are multiple types of them. That makes me think of cellular evolution a bit differently. Link: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10427836/pdf/nihms-1921885.pdf #mitochondria #metabolics

• Post #4370989

  Seriously, why does a site I visited once, months ago, need to store a 50 MB+ cookie on my local machine? (I know the answers; they aren't great) People, remember to check your cookies from time to time. #Internet #Browser

• Post #4284960

  Burnout is far from being one thing, and there is no cure-all for it. It's something we really need to talk more about; normalize as an issue people could be dealing with, and that modern work environment (notably for research and creative work) might be inducing. (I'm fine so far. Work and life are taxing, but I'm handling and keeping an eye on my mental health. The same could not be said for some people around me) #MentalHealth #Burnout

• Post #4283062

  Interesting new work showing plankton being the primary producers of organic matter in the marine realm throughout the Phanerozoic. Link: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9940488/v1 #Plankton #CarbonCycle #PrimaryProductivity #Ocean

• Post #4273931

  #WeekendReading: Zhang and Huang on the role of weathering and reverse weathering on the Cenozoic cooling. Link: https://doi.org/10.1130/G54403.1 #Weathering #Lithium #ClimateChange #EarthsHistory #Geology

• Post #4243241

  Two things I try to avoid are jellyfish🪼 parasite 🪱. Naturally, jellyfish have their own parasites (for maximum creepiness). But the thing is, those parasites don't stay in the jellyfish; they are just a step in their life cycle. 🧪🌊 Link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.29.741456v1 #Ocean #Jellyfish #Parasites

• Post #4229329

  "... Many forms of foundational and integrative labour essential to infrastructure-scale science remain inconsistently recognised within conventional attribution systems." Link: https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/14096/ #Geology #AcademicChatter #Recognition #ValuingLabor

• Post #4228565

  I was looking at a new paper that came out. It had a map in the discussion showing some things. I'm looking at it, and I can spot some glaring omissions in the Indian Ocean. The thing is, I know for sure one of the authors should know about them - we co-authored several papers on them. #AcademicChatter

• Post #4211001

  We need more colloquialisms and common-use words in scientific writing; it is becoming too stiff and stifled (and also less legible and accessible). #AcademicChatter #AcademicWriting

• Post #4197259

  In a brilliant and unexpected find, it turns out that being repeatedly exposed to homophobic hate speech puts the target of it in a bad mental state and desensitizes everyone else to it. This is why you shut that shit down immediately! Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.70056 #Queer #LGBTQ #Homophobia #Intolerance

• Post #4166455

  Climate change, even natural climate change, has been the bane of civilizations before. The Bronze Age collapse was one of the dramatic ones, and extreme drought events might have been at the center of it all. Link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed5439 #ClimateChange #History #BronzeAgeCollapse

• Post #4139742

  Venus doesn't have tectonic plates, or at least not the same way Earth does. But it does have rifting, because tectonic processes work on multiple scales. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-026-02044-8​ #Venus #Tectonics

• Post #4138809

  Just FYI, the call for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowships is now open. As a reminder, if you plan to apply or know someone who is about to, Noam Vogt-Vincent and Rita García Seoane wrote a great (unofficial) application guide. https://zenodo.org/records/15377569 #AcademicChatter

• Post #4129632

  In the Bronze Age, what we call a small town would be a big city, and what we call a major city would be unimaginable. It isn't simple to grasp just how cities have grown through time. So I used a log scale to visualize. Refs & Data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_urban_community_sizes #Cities #History

• Post #4117273

  How many people do we need on a spaceship if we want an extrasolar colony to be viable (genetically)? Someone actually looked at that, and the answer is 1,400-6,800 (but might still require some population control). Link: https://bis-space.com/shop/product/jbis-076-08-0288/ #SciFiScience #SpaceColonization #GenerationShip #Population

• Post #4105554

  Good new tech needs a cool name, and I think Carbothermal Shock hits that. Although at the end of the day, it just comes down to pumping a lot of current through a piece of carbon to generate heat. Link: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.4c12350 #CTS #HeatingElements

• Post #4096083

  Just a gentle reminder for politicians and anyone else in charge of stuff out there: one (person, group, society) doesn't get good at anything, let alone excellent, without some resources, effort, and incentives allocated to the effort. Support is also rather helpful. Both material and just knowing it's there if needed.

• Post #4089533

  LLMs have been with us for a few years now, and in that time have generated both behavioral changes and a lot of... stuff, including what this study calls "LLM Pollution", which presents a possible issue in trying to understand humans as the data source contains more non-human inputs and people themselves change behaviors. How to deal with this calls for some new thinking. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74621-9 #DataPoisoning #LLM

• Post #4083737

  How much of fixing climate needs to be your own personal responsibility, and how much has to do with society as a whole? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that we need both, and that one reinforces the other. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-026-00405-y #ClimateChange

• Post #4069825

  I think that people don't have a full appritiation on the fact that many scientists can't publish wherever they want. So I'll try for the first time here to post a thread (1/n 🧵) explaining this aspect of research space, or at least how it looks for where I was so far. #AcademicChatter #ResearchLife #Publication

• Post #4064132

  Listening to this song again, I noticed it also used a sort of idiosyncrasy. While Hebrew has words for sailing and cruising, it's not uncommon when we're at sea for the bridge to ask לאן לנסוע הלאה, which means "Where to travel next". As a side note, while לנסוע means "to travel", with modern language it's sometimes used interchangeably with לנהוג, which means "to drive", which also works in this context. https://w...

• Post #4064131

  I have no less than three fully written manuscript drafts (I wrote) after at least one round of comments from co-authors that, between other people's drafts, revisions, report and grant writing, and the general craziness here, I can't block enough time to do the final push to wrap up. I also have data for at least two more papers I need to get around to at some point, and a few ideas in the back of my mind, but that's normal, right? #AcademicChatter

• Post #4064130

  Algorithms that detect for GenAI have an nonying bais, they often flag false positives with non-Anglophones. The scope of this is unclear, but it affects researchers (to the point some refer to ‘algorithmic gatekeeping’). Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S106037432600055X #GenAI #AcademicChatter #EnglishSecondLanguage #ESL

• Post #4064129

  Colleague (ecologist): You're almost a biologist, most of the science you post about is biology. Me: No I'm not. Also, damn you, now I have to check that. Me (having done the math for the last two months): Told you I'm not; it's only about quarter (N=122 based on posts in BlueSky as I post there a bit more). #AcademicChatter #SocialMedia

• Post #4064128

  Can 22 more studies cite any of my work (take your pick, there's no shortage https://scholar.google.co.il/citations?user=pXFDRUgAAAAJ&hl=en) in like... the next few days? It really doesn't mean anything, but I sort of want to hit the 3000 citation milestone around when my 100th paper drops. I could use the moral boost with everything I need to deal with in the next few weeks. #AcademicChatter