Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@qoto.org

Honey bees get all the hype, but it's our little native bees that really need help. https://modernfarmer.com/2023/09/are-we-backing-the-wrong-bee/

Did I ever mention that I wrote a book? About the history of females Geoscientists from around the world?

Vote #Zircon in #MinCup23 because it's time, geological time, where continents move and mountains grow over millions of years - all meticulously measured by the steady decay of tiny amounts of uranium and lead trapped in the heart of each and every zircon...

The attached images show what zircons look like when they are analysed, especially the figure on the right which reveals an amazing property of zircon. They can grow like trees with layer upon layer of new zircon being added. A zircon is so robust is that it can:
* form in a magma
* be part of an igneous rock deep in the Earth
* slowed get eroded and weathered at the surface
* become a sand grain
* get washed into an ocean
* be part of sandstone
* get subducted and melted
* add another layer of growth and repeat...

Those layers could just be a few million years apart, sometimes they could be billions of years apart, but each layer inside the zircon has a different story to tell. Unravelling that complex history has taught us a lot about how, over millions of year, the Earth is a crazy, dynamic planet.

Vote for the Time Lord #zircon that has been watching over the geological craziness of the Earth for millions and billions of years.

https://www.mineralcup.org/2023/campaigns/round-1-match-3

Limpet (Patella sp.) feeding trails - the one in the centre was clearly eating on the go! It's trail reminds me of a bungee rope.
Limpet teeth are made up of fibers of Goethite - one of the strongest known natural substances. County Clare, Ireland.

Cormacscoast.com Walking tours

#wildatlanticway #walkingtours #discoverireland #keepdiscovering #marinelife #biodiversity #Limpet #limpetfeedingtrail #goethite #Ireland

It's great to see menstruation and women's specific hygiene in field science get so much airtime right now! It's such a big, potentially embarrassing thing, especially for young women, and normalising talk about menstruation is one way to make fieldwork more accessible.

#WomenInSTEM #fieldwork #menstruation #science
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66659741

#MinCup23 Read Howard Lee’s great article about U-Pb dating of zircons, and use of magnetic data to find out how surprisingly fast the Pilbara Craton was moving 2.7 billion-years ago. This incredible usefulness is why zircon is called the Time Lord.

PLUS #Zircon resilience means that it can survive subduction, metamorphism, partial remelt; exhumation and weathering, becoming part of new rock, and getting beat up. Rinse and repeat. Zircon will store all of this information like a message in a bottle and come back for more.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/early-plate-tectonics-was-surprisingly-speedy/

At the core of both the “polarization” and the “cancel culture” tales is the idea that it used to be better, that America is on a dangerous path away from an exemplary period in the recent past – a golden era of consensus, bipartisanship, and free speech.

That’s white male elite fan fiction.

Here is a thread, outlining the key argument of my new piece: https://mastodon.social/@tzimmer_history/110995711721967561

Looks like insurers are going woke, refusing to insure against disasters that all the Republican politicians insist are a hoax https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/03/natural-disaster-climate-insurance/

Thick smoke coats Edmonton Saturday, special air advisory in effect
Thick smoke from wildfires descended on the city Saturday.
#ctv #news
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/thick-smoke-coats-edmonton-saturday-special-air-advisory-in-effect-1.6546097

If someone you knew had a partner who was prohibiting them from making their own decisions, threatening them and anyone who helps them for going against their wishes, and physically preventing them from leaving, you would probably be extremely concerned.

This is literally what Republicans are doing to women in red states.

They are codifying abuse.

So let me get this straight. Mark Meadows testified that he got involved in the fake electors scheme because (checks notes) he would be afraid Trump would yell at him if he didn’t? That’s his defense? Trump is mean and I was scared of him?

“No, I won’t go to the conference held in Florida.”

"Last year... I suggested to a group of people that it was only a question of time until we saw laws designed to make it impossible for women to travel across state lines. They told me there was no way such a thing could happen in the United States.
And yet, here we are." https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/september-1-2023?r=2y7i1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Burning Man is declared a national emergency within hours. The National Guard is being sent in because 50,000 people don’t have shelter and food.

500,000 homeless in cities all over the USA however is not a national emergency.

It’s not the concentration. There are 65,000 in LA alone. 60,000 in NYC.

What’s the difference?

I just found this bit of history. Only 2 yrs earlier #SCOTUS overturned a precedent that Alito liked (about non-unanimous jury verdicts). He dissented: "The doctrine of 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘴 [to follow precedent] gets rough treatment in today’s decision. Lowering the bar for overruling our precedents, [the] majority casts aside an important and long-established decision with little regard for the enormous reliance the decision has engendered."
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/590/18-5924/

#Abortion #Precedent #SCOTUS

Hammer & Hope is really producing some great content:

https://hammerandhope.org/article/florida-history-slavery-ron-desantis-woke

#quartz inclusions in garnets in metamorphic rocks record structural information that has been obliterated in the rest of the rock. The processes that create snowball #garnet are illuminated by the quartz inclusions! #MinCup23

This Daily Beast piece on DeSantis' security team tripping over themselves to keep a 15-year-old kid from asking difficult questions is pure gold. Getting big time Dead Zone vibes after reading this story, and this kid is my new hero.

His question should be the first that anyone asks every GOP candidate on the campaign trail for the next 14 months:

“Do you believe that Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power,” the teenager asked the governor, “a key principle of American democracy that we must uphold?”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-president-candidate-ron-desantis-is-afraid-of-questions-from-15-year-old-quinn-mitchell

You know those sliced agate geodes you sometimes see in stores and on display?

Did you know you can "read" them?

Look carefully at the levels, banding, crystal habit and orientation, and you can work out how it formed.

Here's a great guide on how to do that: http://www.quartzpage.de/agate.html

It's on the Quartz Page website. Everything fascinating to know about quartz. That's why I'm voting for #Quartz in #MinCup23.