🌸🌹2ck 🌱🐇 @2ck@qoto.org

I'll ask here in English and already asked at a Brazilian instance @ursalzona in Portugues, tips of alternatives to Google:
1) Which good and fast link dontou suggest as an alternative to Google Translate? Here at @climatejustice.social there's a lot of posts in German and I just know very few words, but I don't want to depend on Google;
2) Instead of Google for searching, I wear ecosia.org, which promises to plant trees for each search. Before that I wore duckduckgo. Any other suggestions?
Thanks!

How does that cockle know what way is up? We have a fluid filled inner ear to maintain balance. Most marine invertebrates use organs called statocysts. Pellets inside called statoliths sink and tell them which way is down. In clams, statoliths are made of carbonate, like their shells. Some clams have many statoliths, such as this scallop. The complexity of the statocyst often relates to how mobile the animal is. Scallops are swimmers, but other immobile clams have simpler statocysts. #clamfacts

By now you might be wondering: Why is the telescope #gold?

The mirrors are actually made of Beryllium, which is a very strong and lightweight metal, and are coated in a very thin layer of gold. The total amount of gold on #JWST is only about the size of a marble!

Why gold? Gold is VERY efficient at reflecting infrared light! JWST is designed to search for this heat in the early universe

@dantheclamman thought of you when I came across this. Interesting naming quirk!

From the article:

"Although the megalodon is the most widely known as a giant prehistoric shark, I recently learned that Megalodon wi th a capital M is more accurately the genus name of a group of exinct bivalve mollusks that lived from the Devonian to the Jurassic (picture an ordinary-looking clam)."

https://www.aiweirdness.com/how-to-get-ai-to-confuse-a-shark-with-a-clam/

The perennial question.

#community #cmgr

Yet more spaceships :) #blender3d #MastoArt #fediart #spaceship #conceptart

Hey #biology people ! I'm just reading a paper about some ant mitochondrial #genome being described, and they mention a AT #nucleotide bias. I can't for the life of me remember what that might indicate, and they don't address it in the paper at all.
Anybody to refresh my memory ?

So, I just learned something new. The #fediverse is not just connected #mastodon instances, but actually consists of several different software platforms, all connecting via the same federating protocol! I had seen references to things like #peertube and #nextcloud, but assumed they were different platforms running on different protocols, but it turns out they're all part of the same fediverse, unified by #ActivityPub. Amazing!

#NewHere

Probably no science thread today - I need to actually spend that time doing science! (i.e. my day job 😂 )

I also plan to figure out exactly how I want to use this platform! I might do "Thread Tuesdays" or something where I pick an astronomy/science topic and talk about it in detail on one day of the week, and spend other days just sharing life as a scientist and other things I'm interested in!

And I'm looking forward to going through all the cat pictures you all shared with me over night! 😻

Hi everyone! 👋

Today I'm going to talk a little bit about black holes and what I do as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. I can't cover all black hole physics, or all of my work, but I'll try my best to highlight some of the most interesting things! Join me for a wild ride through spacetime!

🧵 (1/12)