imdef @imdef@qoto.org

...I wish I'd seen this when I wrote about feminization and de-feminization in science history in this blog post in 2017:

https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2017/07/22/why-pockets-and-waves-of-de-feminization-in-sciences-past-matter-now/

Botany had become so feminized in the late 1880s, that there was even an article in Science asking if botany was a suitable profession for men.

There's a lot to learn from botany's subsequent de-feminization. It's not the only example, & it will likely happen again in other fields.

This list of academics on Mathstodon is somewhat useful:

https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon

But it doesn't list mathematicians or physicists. It *does* list "theologidons". What's a theologidon? A don who is a theologian?

"Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents" out today in Nature Human Behavior! There have been a huge number of msinfo-related studies in the past 5 or so years, but almost all of them have been US/Western populations. So here we examined the psychology of misinformation, and the effectiveness of various interactions, across 16 countries (total N=34k).

We find:
➤Consistent cognitive, social & ideological predictors of misinfo belief across countries
➤Interventions (accuracy prompts, digital literacy tips, using crowdsourcing to identify misinfo) are all broadly effective across countries

Give it a read and let me know what you think! https://rdcu.be/dfGtT

Beryllium is the third element in the periodic table, giving it many special properties.
But it hasn't been studied as much as other light elements - because beryllium dust is so poisonous! It can cause fatal scarring of the lungs.

Now a chemist named Boronski 🤨 has made some big progress.

He took beryllocene - two pentagonal rings of carbon and hydrogen connected by a beryllium atom - and managed to stick in an extra beryllium, creating diberyllocene!

Until recently diberyllocene was purely theoretical, and nobody knew if the two berylliums in this molecule would be held together by hydrogen atoms. Now we know they're not.

So it's not like diberyllocene is not like dicobaltacene, which has two cobalts held together by four hydrogens. It's more like dizincocene. I'd never heard of any of these molecules! But in a way this is not surprising, because zinc is a lot like beryllium.

More here:

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/half-century-quest-to-create-stable-beryllium-beryllium-bond-ends-in-success/4017575.article

See those diagonal lines? They are straight, not bent - it's an illusion!

I submitted this illusion (called the paperclip illusion) to the 2023 best visual illusion contest. I think it's a really neat effect, but it's up against some pretty stiff competition though. Check out the entries and vote for your favourite ones!

https://illusionoftheyear.com/vote/

It sounds trivial and obvious, but are you reading error bars correctly?

Do you know whether you're looking at standard errors (measures of inferential uncertainty), standard deviations (measures of spread of individual observations), or 95% confidence intervals around the mean?

And are your intuitions about what each of these mean correct?

Here's a nice primer, refresher, or teaching article.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2659

h/t @jakehofman

Even giraffes use statistics to make decisions! 😉
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32615-3