Lili 🏳️‍⚧️ @neurolili@qoto.org

#Introduction post:

Hi! I'm Alyssa MacKenzie. My pronouns are she/her/they. I'm a non-binary trans woman, activist, LGBTQ+ media consultant, VERY active in my community & live in Orlando, FL.

I'm prominent in the trans community and on social media, mainly for being positive, supportive, yet fiercely protective of trans people and the entire LGBTQ+ community. I've been featured in many newspapers throughout the United States, am a former Field Organizer for the Human Rights Campaign and advocate for pro-equality candidates who will help advance trans liberation.

My contact info is in my profile, and you'll likely see my posts floating around on Fridays, as I typically do 'Trans Appreciation Friday', where all trans/non-binary people are welcome to participate, telling us their name, pronouns, a bit about them and posting a pic, if they feel comfortable.

I'm happy to be here. Please feel free to say hello any time! I'm a friend, a resource and will help in any way I can.

Most of my outdoor ferns are starting to die back for winter, but indoors, this Staghorn Fern brings me joy.

Some recent work suggests that these ferns may be on the cusp of eusociality. They grow on tree with overlapping generations of adult plants in a colony. Some plants specialise in leaf-litter collection and reproduction, and some in water-storage. Not quite an ant or a mole rat, but getting there... https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3373 #ferns #FernFriday #Platycerium #StaghornFern

Can any point me to books or resources about the use of physical models in scientific discovery? (I'm thinking of like how Watson and Crick played around with metal plates to make a double helix, etc)

#HistoryOfScience #science #PopularScience #ScienceBooks

My gingerbread creations from the past two years. Any ideas for what I should try this year?

#science #astronomy #space #baking #art #scicomm #nasa #NASAWebb

Are people really not posting about the awful Ph.D. salaries on here? Or is the search bar just wonky?

Either way, here is a reminder that Biology Ph.D. students are not expected to be able to afford basic living costs.

https://rhettrautsaw.app/shiny/BiologyPhDStipends/

As the largest living #reptile, the saltwater #crocodile can reach 23ft and 2200lbs. With 66 teeth up to 5" long and the world's strongest bite, this modern #megafauna is a formidable predator that feeds on anything. It usually lurks in brackish waters, lunging onto land to capture prey including buffalo, sharks, and humans.
Unlike most reptiles, crocodiles protect their young. Mothers stay with eggs, carry hatchlings to water in their mouths, and care for them for months after hatching.

It was three years ago that I started to see the shadow animals.

So here's a cool thing. These little devices (magnets that attach to the back of your knife) keep delicate slices of, well, whatever you’re slicing, from sticking to the knife-back while you’re working. Garlic is a good test….

During the pandemic I read a few wonderful "cat books" by Japanese authors. Would love some more recommendations (from Japan or any other country).

I Am a Cat (Sōseki Natsume)
The Traveling Cat Chronicles (Hiro Arikawa)
The Guest Cat (Takashi Hiraide)

@bookstodon

#Japan #JapaneseLiterature #Cats #RecommendedReading #Bookstodon

Had trouble choosing a mastodon instance? I got GPT-3 to generate some new possibilities.

flounder.club
Members discuss all different forms of flounder, from deep-sea to land-based.

dinosaur.pocket
All messages must consist of the two letters 'D', for fear that the dinosaurs will eat people's pocketbooks.

frozen.forest
Users must provide a source of warmth in order to post.

https://www.aiweirdness.com/ai-designed-mastodon-communities/

#Glyptodon, like mastodon, is a #megafauna named for its teeth. Ridged molars helped glyptodon-or "Carved Tooth"--process low trees and grasses after shearing sustenance with its strong snout.

The massive #armadillo weighed in at over 4,000lbs and was around 3m long. Protected from most predators by the bony plates of its shell, glyptodon may have been fed on by sabre-tooth cats, #giant bears, and humans. Its extinction coincides with changing climate and human arrival in its territory.

🚨 BIG DATA RELEASE 🚨 We are beyond excited to announce the release of our Brain Wide Map of neural activity during decision making! It consists of 547 Neuropixel recordings of 32784 neurons across 194 regions of the mouse brain 🐭🧠

All these recordings were performed in a distributed fashion in 12 different labs, spanning Europe and the US 🌎 Rigorous standardization of methods and materials allowed us to pool the data from these labs together into a single gigantic dataset 🐙

Mice are performing our standardized perceptual decision-making task in which they have to position a stimulus in the center of a screen to receive reward. The dataset contains the stimuli and decisions, but also videos from three angles and DeepLabCut pose information. We're even releasing all the raw ephys data!

We know, it's a lot. At your own pace you can read all the details about the experimental setup, the task, processing of the data, and much more in the technical paper which accompanies this data release: https://figshare.com/articles/preprint/Data_release_-_Brainwide_map_-_Q4_2022/21400815

To explore the data at your leisure, visit our visualization website where you can scroll through different recording sessions, look at neural activity during example trials, and see trial-based activity of single neurons: https://viz.internationalbrainlab.org

Do you have itchy fingers to run your models on this humongous dataset? We totally get it! Here you can find how to download the data using our API so you can fire up those computing clusters: https://int-brain-lab.github.io/iblenv/notebooks_external/data_release_brainwidemap.html

This was a collective effort of our stellar team, who all put in so much work to make this monumental achievement possible. Our collaboration consists of 22 PIs, 37 researchers, and 11 staff members who all worked tirelessly to bring these data to you, the community 👏🍾

Keeping my tradition of painting octopuses on the bottoms of tables in hotel rooms alive 😀

Today's #megafauna is the giant #squid. This cephalopod can grow up to 43 ft and nearly 2000lbs--yet only lives 5 years. While its size protects it from most predators, sperm whales often feed on the squid.

For food, giant squids attack fish from below with two long feeding #tentacles. 12" diameter eyes help them spot prey. Eight arms with toothed suckers move meals to the beak and tongue, which grind food up so that it can safely pass through the ring-shaped brain on the way to the stomach.