tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

I always have lunch alone in my car, not because I hate my workmates. It's because I don't want them to find out that I like to eat my pot noodle dry straight from the pot. I'd be mortified if they found out, they might think I'm weird.

There you go. Two and a half minutes of JWST time. Thanks to ESA for making it look very good. https://esawebb.org/images/potm2408b/

Fascinating nugget. I wasn't even aware that 🇯🇵 schools have their own songs 🎶
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15399629

Africa asked for more say in global health decisions after Covid. It now has that. The mpox declaration is a test of this new power. African leaders now have to own the solutions to African problems – but that comes with a risk of friction with global health players. https://open.substack.com/pub/continent/p/mpox-declaration-marks-a-key-shift

New symbiosis just dropped! Sundews (Drosera) are a carnivorous plant genus found worldwide. I keep three species myself! They trap small prey with sticky secretions on tentacles. A new study finds that a particular fungus within the secretions does most of the grunt work of digesting the prey, sharing nutrients with the plant!

https://www.newswise.com/articles/new-discovery-fundamentally-changes-the-way-we-understand-charles-darwin-s-most-beloved-plant-the-sundew

Me: Trying to explain to people that #Minnesota has a lot of skilled chefs making good foods from many culinary traditions.

The Minnesota state fair: We have Lakota food, Hmong food, Somali food, and Dutch fried cakes made to be gluten-free.

Me: See what I mean?

The Minnesota state fair: We also have deep-fried ranch dressing on a stick.

Me: What.

Russian schools are introducing an extracurricular program in “family studies” that encourages “pro-family values such as marriage, large families, and chastity” in an effort to address the country’s “demographic issues.” Good luck, 5th–9th graders. https://verstka.media/semyevedenie-vvedut-v-programmu-s-novogo-uchebnogo-goda-news

🔖 World's most effective climate policies identified in new study: Mix of carrots and sticks tends to work better than single policies, research finds | CBC News https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/effective-climate-policies-1.7301998 #BookmarkShare

Interrupting my vacation animal & nature posting to congratulate my #ESA colleagues on the amazing #Juice lunar-Earth flyby, the first of it's kind 💪 And it was so nicely precise, that they could save some fuel for extra scientific shenanigans in the Jupiter system!

▶️ https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/Juice_rerouted_to_Venus_in_world_s_first_lunar-Earth_flyby

Btw., if you want to know more here on #fedi, you should read the recent threads my (former) colleague @markmccaughrean who majorly contributed to making those lovely images of Earth & Moon!

#astrodon

the thing that is mind blowing to me about parasitism is, like all biological signaling, the need for specificity in extremely adverse conditions. like this parasite is "just" a muscle tube - no circulatory system, like a couple neurons maybe, and yet they can so something so specific as make horizontally polarized light reflected of the surface of deep water more attractive to get into. What is the signal, and what is the target? Presumably there isn't a "go to polarized light" neuron or molecule in the mantis, so presumably has to synthesize multiple proteins/signaling molecules or infect multiple neurons to cause the needed behavior.

this paper describes a huge amount of horizontal gene transfer in the parasite, so through its evolution the parasite has stolen a bunch of genes from the host and uses them to control it once inside. like metasploit or whatever, it has a bunch of plugins that lets it hijack different mantids. what it lacks in anatomical novelty it makes up for in capacity for chemical warfare.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.09.052

i felt this way when studying steroid hormones too - like how does a molecule that gets spread around your entire bloodstream induce hyperspecific affects at multiple timescales from acute/behavioral through chronic/body patterning... it's like you only have a dozen or two words and you need to get a few million people to understand completely different things by shouting them into a room. biology is wild as hell.

"America, where hate has no safe harbor," has not joined the International Criminal Court, so hate does have a little safe harbor here tbh

Also, criticizing the organization as “justice warriors from Madison Avenue” is so funny to me. That Russian officials can make these niche references to American culture while ostensibly rejecting U.S. influence is a many-layered irony cake.

This is a wholly terrifying read in at least two separate fronts:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4881086

front 1) Every $1 spent in sports betting is $2 not put towards personal finance

front 2) We know this because there exists a dataset where 60 million people's financial lives are tracked down to individual transactions with specific sports sites (and so everything else)

Messin' around with the famous MeerKAT galactic center data. The provided spectral index is certainly is a different way to go about colorizing an image. Tried to fix some of the dark halos around the bright nebulosity. Not sure whether they were introduced during mosaicing, or if it's just a product of creating imagery from radio data.

'She said that Irish passports, with membership of the EU, would probably be among the most covet­ed. For decades, unmarried Irish mothers were coerced into giving up their children for adoption in Britain.

A spokesperson for Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed would-be Irish citizens have already started using DNA evidence to help prove they are entitled to Irish citizenship through a parent, and that this evidence is submissible in passport applications.'

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/18/rise-in-dna-tests-used-to-claim-citizenship-of-other-countries-brexit-eu

JOURNALISME & TWITTER

J'aimerais attirer votre attention et vous inviter à une petite réflexion, au moyen de cet article.
Il a le fond...
...Mais il y aussi un détail très intéressant.

Lisez donc.

https://www.watson.ch/fr/suisse/rts/922362416-alexis-favre-quitte-le-reseau-social-x

1/5

Study (N=23K) finds 88% of top performing women receive feedback on perf evals on their personalities compared to just 12% of male counterparts. https://fortune.com/2024/08/08/most-high-performing-women-recieve-negative-feedback-quit-jobs/

On a different note it's disheartening to see how many more starlink satellites are in my recent photos compared to even two years ago