Barbara 🇺🇦 @babs_at_masto@qoto.org

I'm always amazed at the talent of past dissection drawings by microscope-biologists: this bee by Pfurtscheller dates to 1902.

Mountain Lion kittens! https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-12/four-mountain-lion-kittens-born-santa-monica-mountains #cats #mountainLions #p22 #california

Hello world! Happy to be here, tweeting (whoops, tooting!) about the science we do in my group. here's our latest paper on the Pliocene North American Monsoon.

This is part of a broader project to study past reorganizations of tropical and subtropical hydroclimate during warm climate intervals

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022AV000757

How Canadians are born.
#MeanwhileInCanada

It's been over a week since nearly 600,000 gallons of oil from the Keystone pipeline spilled into Kansas' Mill Creek and surrounding land. Environmental advocates say it will likely take years to clean up.
https://t.co/YvViY1XIhV

It's getting more dangerous, and more difficult, to criticize the Chinese government on campus. The latest arrest of a Berklee student who stalked an activist and said he'd “chop" her "bastard hands off" if she posted more protest signs shows that danger for activists is escalating: https://www.thefire.org/news/arrest-student-boston-grim-reminder-danger-facing-chinese-dissidents-campus

The wealthiest 10% of the UK use, on average, more energy just for international flights than the poorest 20% use for everything. https://www.carbonbrief.org/richest-people-in-uk-use-more-energy-flying-than-poorest-do-overall/

Just before the invasion, #Ukraine made a deal with #Amazon #AWS to create a data warehouse for its government information and infrastructure: tax and property records, bank statements, and the like. Things that an invaded and occupied Ukraine might lose if Russia got their hands on the only copies.

They literally snuck Pelican crates full of SSDs into the country and spirited them back offshore after backing up 10 petabytes of important historic and legal records.

This paragraph, second from the end, really put a fine point on why Amazon did this: They were not beholden to, nor being held hostage by, any Russian operations...because they never had any:

Amazon didn’t have to worry about its relationship with Russia on the Snowball project. It doesn’t have one. “We didn’t have anything to turn off there,” Maxwell said. “We had never invested there. It’s a point of principle.”

Truly an amazing story from the #LATimes.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-15/amazon-ukraine-war-cloud-data

'Fanatical supporters of Brazil’s outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, have torched cars and buses and tried to storm the federal police headquarters in the country’s capital in what one commentator called a botched attempt to spark a January 6-style turmoil.

The violence erupted on Monday evening after the leftwing politician who defeated Bolsonaro in October’s historic election – former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – had his victory officially ratified by Brazil’s electoral court.'

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/13/bolsonaro-supporters-try-to-storm-police-hq-in-january-6-style-rampage

A type of clam 🦪thought to be extinct, and known only to researchers by fossils it left behind thousands of years ago, has turned up alive and well off the coast of California in the USA! 🇺🇸

More by @astrogasparini@twitter.com from @sciencenews@twitter.com: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/clam-presumed-extinct-found-alive

I'm officially done with Twitter. I won't delete my account, hoping against hope the company can somehow shake MusQ, but I will not be participating.

Join me on Mastodon. @marklemley

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/technology/elon-musk-twitter-shakeup.html

This cover of The Weight crossed my timeline tonight, I've never heard it before but the arrangement is absolutely outstanding, a wonderful cover of a great song. https://youtu.be/ph1GU1qQ1zQ

#NASA’s #PerseveranceRover Records the #FirstSounds of a #DustDevil on #Mars

“In a stroke of luck, the SuperCam microphone on Perseverance was turned on the moment a dust devil swept directly over the rover.”

https://eos.org/articles/nasas-perseverance-rover-records-the-first-sounds-of-a-dust-devil-on-mars

Someone just mentioned the differences between #Twitter and #Google regarding user data. Yes, indeed.

I've worked inside #Google twice. Their explicit rules, approvals, logging and "need to know" requirements for access to user data are most impressive. Anyone even attempting to access user data inappropriately is fired and marched out the door by security. This is part of why I have a great deal of trust in Google, and consider Elon's #Twitter to be utterly untrustworthy and totally beneath contempt.